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I May Destroy You and how it represents the future of TV

In BBC Culture's poll of the greatest series of the 21st Century, Michaela Coel's blistering drama was the most recent top 10 entry. Leila Latif considers its revolutionary power.

In the penultimate episode of the BBC/HBO drama series I May Destroy You, a character turns to Michaela Coel's Arabella and for a moment seems to break the fourth wall to ask "I thought you were writing about consent?" Arabella, who is writer Coel's fictional on-screen alter-ego, shrugs, "So did I". The evident point being that Coel's masterwork, which she famously wrote 191 drafts of, is so much more than a story about consent: it's a radical, funny, devastating show about race, art, trauma and rebirth.

Warning: this article contains references to and discussion of sexual assault

The 100 greatest TV series of the 21st Century:

–  The 100 greatest TV series of the 21st Century

–  How the way we watch TV has changed

–  What makes The Wire such a great number one  

–  Twenty-five series that define the 21st Century   

After making two series of her broader, semi-autobiographical comedy Chewing Gum for Channel 4, and making a name for herself in acting roles in the likes of Black Mirror, Been So Long and Black Earth Rising, Coel made the extraordinarily brave decision to create a new show centred around the aftermath of a rape, loosely based on an assault that happened to her.

It was an incident that she had first publicly spoken about when she was invited to give the James MacTaggart Lecture at the 2018 Edinburgh International Television Festival – the first black woman to do so. During her lecture she laid bare the difficulties she'd had as a black woman in the industry, having been consistently undervalued and undermined by colleagues while making Chewing Gum, before telling the audience about her assault. "I was working overnight in the [production] company’s offices," she explained. "I had an episode due at 7am I took a break and had a drink with a good friend who was nearby. I emerged into consciousness typing season two, many hours later. I was lucky. I had a flashback. It turned out I'd been sexually assaulted by strangers." At its core, I May Destroy You is about Coel trying to process this violence, to tease out what is forever lost through such an assault, and what can be restored, while also taking on the specificities of sexuality, gender and British blackness.

At number six in BBC Culture's poll of the 100 greatest TV series of the 21st Century, I May Destroy You is the most recent entry in the top 10 (having premiered in June 2020) and arguably both the most radical and of the 21st Century, in that no version of this show could have existed in the century, or even the decade, prior. Coel pushed boundaries in her depictions of race, gender and sex and did so with a disregard to narrative and filmmaking conventions. I May Destroy You suggests for all the great television we've had so far this millennium, how much opportunity there still is for it to evolve and develop as an art form.

It was only when Michaela Coel approached the BBC that she was given what she wanted and deserved, including full creative control

Key to I May Destroy You's brilliance is the absolute creative control Coel had over the show. She was originally offered $1 million (£729,500) from Netflix for the show but after her experiences on Chewing Gum she turned down their offer when, even after lengthy negotiations, they refused to allow her to retain any percentage of the copyright. It was only when she approached the BBC that she was given what she wanted and deserved, including full creative control, something that co-producer HBO would also agree to when they signed on.

Originally titled January 22nd, the show begins on that day, with Arabella coming to the end of an Italian sojourn, heading for the airport while trying to get to her drug dealing lover Biagio (Marouane Zotti) to commit to a future for their relationship before she leaves. Arabella has been sent to Italy to complete writing her book, a follow up to her successful debut memoir Chronicles of a Fed-Up Millennial, which made her a minor celebrity with a sizeable internet presence. Having had a largely unproductive spell in Italy on the publishers' dime, she returns to London with little to show for it, and with a morning meeting with her book agents looming, she installs herself in their offices overnight to finish her draft off. But rather than spend her remaining few hours before her deadline typing, she then decides to go and blow off some steam with friends at a bar – where she is drugged, raped and blacks out until she finds herself sitting back in her agent's office with blood trickling down her forehead.

It is then for Arabella to piece together what happened to her, the manner in which she was assaulted and the behaviour of her friends which made her more vulnerable, all while contending with the impact that this incident has not just on her, but her work. Coel's Arabella is a fully realised complicated woman, fiercely intelligent, funny and self-destructive. Over the course of the series, which follows her for around a year, we watch her grow and implode, over and over again. She takes brave stands, publicly calling out a fellow writer Zain (Karan Gill) for assaulting her in a separate incident, but, such is her vulnerability also, she cannot resist returning to Italy to try to reconcile with Biagio by breaking into his flat, even after he accuses her of being responsible for her own rape.

That leads to one of the show's most striking moments: Arabella finds out the police investigation into her rape is closed, is rejected by a gun-wielding Biagio and, alone and isolated, cries on an Italian beach, looking out at the sea with a piece of paper in her hand, having tried to channel a little bit of this pain into her art. She stares out at the horizon and wordlessly marches into the sea. Coel told GQ in 2020 that "this is the moment where she gathers up this kind of darkness she needs to overcome her trauma. I'm constantly exploring the idea of going under, under the bed, under the sea, under under under… Watching it you don't know what she’s going to do, does she want to drown? But it's also a form of baptism, it's what religious ceremonies do, not to die but to be reborn."

The apex of TV’s reckoning with sexual violence

I May Destroy You's depiction of sexual assault is as important as it is unflinching. Indeed, it stands at the apex of some deeply-felt explorations of sexual violence and abuse on the small screen in recent years, in shows like Unbelievable, Sex Education, Orange Is The New Black and The Morning Show. In these, the victim's experience has been centred and power imbalances, coercion and gender dynamics are given their full weight. That stands in contrast to the way in which many shows have used rape as a gratuitous plot device in the past: think of the brutalisation of Sansa Stark in season five of Game Of Thrones, or The Sopranos, where Dr Melfi's graphic assault, and its effect on her is afforded a single episode, and used largely to shock the audience before signalling her moral goodness.

What's more, while I May Destroy You isn't a show just "about consent", its depiction of the nuances of consent is unparalleled. Arabella's initial rape, by a stranger who drugs her, is the most clean-cut non-consensual act, but the series delves into greyer areas. She's further violated when Zain "stealths" her (as the practice of non-consensually removing a condom during sex has become known) while her friend Kwame (Paapa Essiedu) is pinned down and forcibly humped by a man he has just had consensual sex with, before he in turn has sex with a woman without revealing that he is a gay man. Perhaps most subtle of all is what happens to Terry (Weruche Opia), who has a threesome with two men who she believes to be strangers but later realises they were friends manipulating her into group sex. In almost all these cases the characters are, at first, unsure how to feel or classify what has happened to them.

We don't tend to write or portray realistic rape and its aftermath a lot because it's almost too difficult to watch. But we need these realistic depictions against the litany of insidious ones – Jamie Klingler

For Jamie Klingler, co-founder of Reclaim These Streets, a UK activist group which seeks to end violence against women, that complexity is one of the show's most powerful elements. "We learn very young that rape victims aren't believed and so then we tend to not believe ourselves or our judgment of what happens. We have internalized misogyny that casts [ourselves] as an unreliable narrator," she tells BBC Culture. "So many of us have questioned whether or not our experience qualifies as sexual assault, regardless of how assaulted we feel. We put things into the prism of 'would they be prosecutable' rather than whether our bodies were violated."

Perhaps most revolutionary of all is the fact that what we see play out on screen is so personal to Coel: in a world where women are expected to feel shame around their sexual assaults, it is courageous that Coel refused to stay silent about what happened to her. "What Michaela Coel has done is incredibly brave," agrees Klingler. We don't tend to write or portray realistic rape and its aftermath a lot [in the same] way that we don't write or portray realistic grief because it's almost too difficult to watch. But we need these realistic depictions against the litany of insidious ones."

Another exhilarating aspect of I May Destroy You is the sheer distinctiveness of Michaela Coel's voice: she is part of a wave of millennial small-screen "auteurs" who have flourished in the last decade, including Girls' Lena Dunham, Atlanta's Donald Glover, Insecure's Issa Rae and Fleabag's Phoebe Waller-Bridge. This new generation of television creators seem to have dug into the specificity of their lived experiences and portrayed them with focused self-reflection, not needing to contort themselves to make them more likeable or broadly understood.

The thing that stood out to me were just how intrinsically black-British the show was… It was specific. Intentionally specific. And all the richer for it – Camilla Blackett

In I May Destroy You, Coel's voice centred her lived black-Britishness on screen and refused to simplify it or treat blackness as an Afro-Caribbean monolith. For black-British screenwriter Camilla Blackett, who started on teen drama Skins in the UK and has worked in Hollywood for the past decade and is currently, like Coel before her, creating a show for HBO, I May Destroy You’s specificity was one of its greatest strengths. "There's so much to be said and [that] has already been said about the show and Michaela's ownership of her story, but for me the thing that stood out to me was just how intrinsically black-British the show was," she tells BBC Culture. Unlike with so many black-British stars like Idris Elba, Daniel Kaluuya, John Boyega or Thandiwe Newton who have become global names, Coel's success was not tied to perfecting an American accent. "It was not pre-chewed to be easily digested for a black-American audience," Blackett continues. "It was our slang, our vernacular, our lived racial experience in what it is to live in this densely-populated multicultural postage stamp of land. It was specific. Intentionally specific. And all the richer for it."

Over 12 episodes the show also explores dysfunctional relationships with social media, recovery, friendship, homophobia, creativity, false allyship, toxic positivity, childhood trauma, Euro-centric beauty standards and the commodification of black pain. But where that would leave most television shows hopelessly overstuffed, I May Destroy You has such subtlety with its themes that the resulting show feels languid, almost restrained, never needing to oversell any of its ideas. As Coel herself told GQ: "Throughout the show generally I'm never trying to tell the audience how to feel, what to think or who to judge. I'm just presenting a story. I'm presenting movement. I'm presenting people doing things and if I were trying to get you to think a certain way I think that would have been a forfeit to the kind of show I tried to create."

Since I May Destroy You premiered last year, the response to it has been rhapsodic: the show was measured by review aggregator site Metacritic to be the most critically-acclaimed television programme of 2020, ahead of Better Call Saul, Normal People and The Queen's Gambit, while Coel has graced magazine covers, becoming the first black female filmmaker to make the front of esteemed British film magazine Sight & Sound. The awards have also come thick and fast, with the show picking up Emmys, Independent Spirit Awards, Baftas and an NAA Award, among others. Upon receiving her Bafta for leading actress, Coel dedicated the award to the show's intimacy coordinator Ita O'Brien saying, "Thank you for your existence in our industry, for making the space safe, for creating physical, emotional and professional boundaries so that we can make work about exploitation, loss of respect, about abuse of power without being exploited or abused in the process."It was a moment that reminded us not only of Coel's eloquence and graciousness as an artist but also that, in re-enacting her sexual assault, she had made herself vulnerable while ensuring she was valued, protected and nurtured.

Following her win, Coel also confirmed there would definitely not be a second season. No matter how much the audience wanted it, their time with Arabella, Kwame and Terry had come to an end. This is another element of the show in keeping with prevailing currents: where many of the big shows of TV's post-millennium "golden age" sprawled out into five, six, seven or eight series, we are seeing an increasing number of prestige dramas and comedies deciding that small is perfectly formed and opting for a one or two season run instead. Think of the strength of this year's limited series category at the Emmys, where I May Destroy You competed with WandaVision, The Underground Railroad, Mare of Easttown and The Queen's Gambit.

What does closure look like? It’s not that it ends. For me, I look at the last four years and I feel this overwhelming sense of euphoria and pain – Michaela Coel

The final, perfect, episode of I May Destroy You sees Arabella return to the scene of her assault and confront the man who raped her. Coel presents three alternative versions of the confrontation. The first is a revenge fantasy: Arabella, Terry and their old school acquaintance Theo lure her attacker to a bathroom where they drug him, beat him to a bloody pulp and deposit him under her bed. There's an empty catharsis in the violence that seems to satisfy no one. The second centres the rapist's perspective – and as he prepares to rape Arabella in the bathroom stall, she, purposely too high on cocaine to be knocked unconscious, reveals her lucidity. His shock turns to anger which in turn leads to a tearful apology. Arabella extends him sympathy as he confesses his past abuses and the failure of therapy to fix him. The police eventually drag him away and to a certain extent Arabella has her answers, an explanation of why this all happened to her, but that doesn't undo any of the damage he's done.

Finally, we are presented the most fantastical alternative. In a dreamlike sequence Arabella is in the now sunlit nightclub, where she buys her rapist a gin and tonic. They kiss and go back to Arabella's flat, and stare intently at each other with naked tenderness before having sex, with her penetrating him. The next morning, she asks him to go and he walks out, still naked, while the bloodied version of him from the earlier alternative ending also crawls out from under the bed and follows.

It is clear none of these scenarios have actually happened: these are the alternatives Arabella is considering for her new book, now titled January 22nd and based on what happened to her. But as she imagines how her story could end, she dismisses each one. In an interview with New York Magazine, Coel pondered: "What does closure look like? It's not that it ends. For me, I look at the last four years and I feel this overwhelming sense of euphoria and pain". Instead of tying a neat narrative ribbon around the assault, in the episode's coda we see the book is finally completed, and as Arabella is about to read the foreword at an event in a bookshop, she is momentarily transported back to that Italian beach before the episode cuts to black. Because what I May Destroy You does in its entirety is serve as its own ending. There's no closure to be had in a single moment, no confrontation or pithy monologue that would make sense of what happened to Arabella or Coel – but instead both of them channelled their pain, their empathy and their anger into art that is radical, raw, and magnificent.

While so many of the entries in BBC Culture's 100 greatest TV series of the 21st Century poll have elevated TV as an art form, I May Destroy You is perhaps the show that, most of all, speaks to its future. Coel ripped up the rule book and played with form, structure and pace; gave voice to underrepresented people, themes and consequences; and came up with a series unlike any that had preceded it, showing what she, and other artists, are able to do when ed in creating singular personal visions. Looking ahead to the TV series of the next decade, let's only hope similarly fearless creativity can be allowed to prosper.

– The 100 greatest TV series of the 21st Century

– What makes The Wire such a great a number one  

– Twenty-five series that define the 21st Century   

How many of these series have you seen? Let us know using the hashtag #TVOfTheCentury on our Facebook page or message us on Twitter.

Love film and TV?  BBC Culture Film and TV Club on Facebook, a community for cinephiles all over the world.

If you would like to comment on this story or anything else you have seen on BBC Culture, head over to our Facebook page or message us on Twitter. 

And if you liked this story, sign up for the weekly bbc.com features newsletter, called The Essential List. A handpicked selection of stories from BBC Future, Culture, Worklife and Travel, delivered to your inbox every Friday.

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