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. 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. 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. 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. Key to I May Destroy You's brilliance is the absolute creative control Coel had over the show. 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. Coel pushed boundaries in her depictions of race, gender and sex and did so with a disregard to narrative and filmmaking conventions. 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.Īt 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. I emerged into consciousness typing season two, many hours later. "I had an episode due at 7am I took a break and had a drink with a good friend who was nearby. "I was working overnight in the company’s offices," she explained. 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. 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. – Twenty-five series that define the 21st CenturyĪfter 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. – What makes The Wire such a great number one – The 100 greatest TV series of the 21st Century The 100 greatest TV series of the 21st Century: Warning: this article contains references to and discussion of sexual assault 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. 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".
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