MICHAELA COEL'S 'I MAY DESTROY YOU' STILL DESTROYS ME FIVE YEARS LATER

There are shows you binge and forget by the following Tuesday. And then there’s I May Destroy You—Michaela Coel’s electric, unflinching, frequently funny (yes, funny) masterpiece that manages to talk about trauma, consent, and the chaos of millennial life without feeling like a PSA. When it first aired in 2020, the world was deep in lockdown, sourdough, and social awakening—and somehow this show cut through all of it with a story so specific it felt universal.

*MILD SPOILERS FOR 'I MAY DESTROY YOU' FROM THIS POINT* CONTENT WARNING: SEXUAL ASSAULT

We Have To Start Observing Bob.

Premiering on HBO on June 7, 2020, I May Destroy You operates on three main levels: as a love letter to the power of friendship, as an exploration of the slipperiness of memory and how it informs identity, and as a sneak peak inside the life of a messy millennial woman, none of which is handled quite in the way you'd expect. And at the center of it all is Arabella, (played with almost unnerving naturalism by Coel herself) a writer on the cusp of fame.

One of the most immediately striking things about I May Destroy You is its tone. The first episode almost has a hangout vibe as it charts the scope of Arabella’s daily life: her friendships, her wry humor, and her work, which includes a book—Chronicles of a Fed-Up Millennial—that brought her a little internet fame. While the first book emerged naturally from her Twitter musings, the second book comes with the pressure of agents, a publishing house, monetary advances, and an onslaught of new expectations. Then it all turns on its axis with the single, brief moment of Arabella remembering a shard of her night spent in a bathroom stall, a man looming above her with a sick grin.

This play on tonality runs throughout the series; Scenes that begin sexy become harrowing, dark moments are tinged with the comedic but neither lose sight of the dramatic stakes.

The moment toward the end of the first episode when Arabella, a lushly hedonistic protagonist, loosely stumbles in a bar named "Ego Death", we know what's happened. Her physicality makes legible what the plot reveals later: Her drink has been drugged, she’s been raped, and her road to recovery will be winding.

Being a Woman is the F*ckin' Worst

The series, somewhat unimaginatively, has been described as a series about consent, but that feels way too narrow a take for what I May Destroy You is doing—narratively, tonally, and visually.

As Arabella tries to write her second book under the tutelage of increasingly pressing literary agents and investigates what happened to her the night her drink was spiked, the show goes down a multitude of avenues in order to explore not just the nature of consent but the dynamics of modern dating and desire itself.

Memory provides fertile ground for I May Destroy You. It skitters, it illuminates, it darkens, it obscures. This is where the show shines—in depicting what it feels like when your mind is working against you in the wake of trauma and that singular moment when your body no longer feels like your own. Sometimes, a noise akin to a ringing in your ear strikes through a scene alongside bodies moving slowly in a way that gets at Arabella’s experience of moving through a world that no longer fully makes sense.

Perhaps the show’s greatest strength beyond its precise handling of its various tonalities is how it charts the dynamic between Arabella and her two best friends, Kwame (Paapa Essiedu), an aerobics instructor perpetually on Grindr, and Terry (Weruche Opia), a sincere, exuberant actress. Each character provides an entry to explore these questions of consent and desire, sometimes to a heartbreaking degree. Both Essiedu and Opia shade their characters with longing and vulnerability that exists right alongside the more raucous qualities that make them compatible friends for the sometimes-frantic Arabella.

Do You Grow? Are You Into Growing?

Coel, who writes, stars in, and occasionally directs the series, proves her stunning talent as an artist in the wake of her slightly manic, British comedy Chewing Gum, about a young woman hell-bent on losing her virginity. Like Chewing Gum, I May Destroy You isn’t trying to teach its audience a lesson, but put them on a journey that challenges assumptions, in this case about assault, survivors, and perpetrators.

But the show stands, ultimately, on the strength of Coel as creator. The direction is lucid, employing a camera that is both curious and kind. And the writing is striking for its willingness to delve into uncomfortable territory without ever flinching.

But what keeps I May Destroy You living rent free in my head is Coel’s performance. She’s wild, charismatic, and yearning. During scenes where she’s dealing with the fallout from trying to tell her Italy-based situationship about what happened to her (which he responds to by blaming her for her own rape...a**hole), or when she’s in group therapy, I was taken aback by the way a small shift in her body or faraway glance could reveal the emotional reality of Arabella’s situation.

And it’s all textured in a way that feels distinctly London: specifically Black, millennial London. In one gut-wrenching scene, Arabella speaks about how the feminist cause didn’t appeal to her when she was younger because she never paid attention to being a woman. She was “too busy being black and poor”. This and many of the references to being broke, millennial, Black and Brit are specific without ever being exclusionary—Arabella’s millennial pink hair, the quiet ache of a voice note left unread. It's the details that turn onscreen pain into something lived-in.

Visually, the show is lush in that lowkey London way—sun-dappled flats with broken blinds, the warm flicker of takeout containers lit by phone screens, the club scenes you know were filmed at 5 a.m. but still feel alive. The color palette is slightly woozy—all bleached neon, dusty pastels, and the kind of interiors that look like nobody paid rent but everybody has a houseplant.

Even the fashion becomes a kind of shield and cipher—Arabella’s style (from the wigs to the hats to the baggy tees) reads as armor. Each look is both costume and confession. It’s the wardrobe of someone who’s always mid-transformation, whether she knows it or not. And there’s something almost punk in how Arabella's aesthetics always align (or misalign) with her emotional journey.

Thank You For What You're Doing.

At its heart, it's not just a series about consent. It’s about the experiences of Black Africans living in London; it’s about friendship; it’s about race and racism; it’s about learning to take the time to sit with yourself; it’s about expressing vulnerability through a cardigan; it’s about hair; it’s about empathy; and it’s about acceptance. It’s about whether self-determination—that ideology central to neoliberalism—is enough to transcend your past. It’s about whether you can stop the people around you from making grave mistakes. It’s about whether you can have control over your body, when people do terrible, half-remembered things to it, to you.

When I first watched I May Destroy You in the summer of 2020, it hit like a cold glass of water to the face. Sharp. Bracing. Necessary. Coel has given us something so rare: a work that's not afraid to look messy, to feel unformed, to tell the truth without ever flinching. Its final episode now reads like a necessary refusal of narrative neatness. It’s messy because healing is messy. Because people are. And I May Destroy You may not offer resolution. But it offers something even more radical: reclamation.

5/5 ★: A radical act of self-possession

If you are in crisis, please call RAINN’s National Sexual Assault Hotline at 800-656-HOPE for free, anonymous support and resources.

Additional resources can also be found at Helping Survivors, a proud partner of RAINN, who offer a variety of resources for survivors and their families—and are continuously adding more.

Visit www.helpingsurvivors.org to learn more.