WHAT REALLY HAPPENED LAST NIGHT
Trauma leads to a brilliant examination of sexual mores in the millennial age,
Afew years ago while working on the second season of her breakout cringe comedy series Chewing
Gum — the story of a young London girl looking to lose her virginity — actress and writer Michaela Coel took a break from her writing and went out for drinks with some friends. She woke up several hours later at her production company’s offices and had a flashback, realising something was wrong. As she tried to piece together the hazy events of the previous night, Coel realised that her drink had been spiked and she’d been sexually assaulted by strangers.
The experience forms the basis for Coel’s extraordinary, ambitious and brilliant new examination of sexual mores in the millennial age. I May Destroy
You is a multi-layered, difficult-to-define HBO drama that’s full of rage, love, laughter and empathy.
Coel plays Arabella, a young writer whose Twitter musings have been published as a successful book, bringing her a cult hipster following and a legion of fans who quote passages from it to its author when they bump into her on the street, begging for selfies. When we meet Arabella she’s returning from a writing trip to Italy where she’s spent most of her time having fun and hooking up with a handsome local drug dealer. With a day to spare before her first draft is due at her agents, Arabella arrives home in London fully intending to pull an all-nighter and deliver the goods.
But life and her two best friends — aspiring actress Terry (Weruche Opia) and Grindr addict Kwame (Paapa Essiedu) — have other plans and soon she’s putting her work aside for “just an hour” as she makes her way into the London night for a quick drink and catch up. One thing leads to another and Arabella finds herself very drunk, coked up and stumbling across the floor of the Ego Death Bar — only to wake up early the next morning, with a massive hangover, a bruise on her head and an initially confusing but quickly terrifying flashback of a grotesque stranger’s contorted face rearing over her in a toilet stall.
That’s the basic plot of the first episode. From there we’re taken on a diverse and far-reaching intellectual and psychological 12-chapter journey as Arabella attempts to figure out what happened to her and to deal with her trauma. She must also face the fickle celebrity of social media, the hungry dollar signs in the eyes of her publishers (who see an opportunity to mint money out of her experience), the small forgotten incidents from her adolescent past that now seem like billboard-size warning signs about her current predicament and the many ways in which consent is exploited in all areas of the digital dating world. It’s also a cleverly subtle meta-examination of the creative process and its shortcomings as a means for working through the very deep and often debilitating psychological scars of real life.
As a writer, Coel has an enviable ability to keep the uncomfortable themes of her story front and centre without resorting to off-putting didacticism. Instead, she allows them to simmer under the skin of her threedimensional, carefully crafted individual characters. As an actress she has a rare talent for conveying a wide range of contradictory emotions in the simplest of actions, which never allows us to accept Arabella merely as victim or heroine but rather as a relatable and real mix of traits that are sometimes endearing, sometimes exasperating and even deplorable — but always understandable.
There’s plenty to think and talk about at the end of this gloriously messy and sometimes depressingly recognisable look at sex and the power relations that drive it, but there are also no pat, safe answers to its big questions and no satisfying resolution at its conclusion because that’s life — and that’s invigoratingly rare to see on television these days.
I May Destroy You available from August 26 on Showmax. New episodes added weekly.