The police are sympathetic and active in investigating Arabella’s case, but they aren’t able to help her. The mystery story of “I May Destroy You” is its least important element.
These include a problematic threesome for Terry and a forced sexual encounter for Kwame, but also potentially rewarding relationships for both - subplots that are well executed but can feel schematic.
#I MAY DESTROY YOU EPISODES SERIES#
The series makes room for their adventures in negotiating the contemporary sexual landscape. In the aftermath, the only person who blames her for the situation is a sometime lover whom she met when she bought drugs from him.Īrabella is helped, for the most part, in her post-rape program of self-care by her two best friends: Terry (Weruche Opia, who’s fabulous), an overly dramatic but steadfast actress, and Kwame (Paapa Essiedu), an aerobics instructor who appears to spend every waking moment checking in on the gay hookup app Grindr. On the night she’s attacked, she stays sober because she’s planning to return to work but then falls victim to a spiked drink.
The tightly wound Arabella is an enthusiastic partyer and consumer of party drugs, facts that the show presents as pertinent to her story but not as reasons for judgment or sentimental regret. Her reaction at that point is not horror but a bemused “Huh.”
The next morning she comes to consciousness sitting at her computer, happily hitting the send button but harboring a disturbing image of a man looming over her in a restroom stall. She’s a champion procrastinator - the depiction of the not-writing process is just one of the show’s many pitch-perfect vignettes - and during an all-nighter, she takes a break to meet a friend at a club.
#I MAY DESTROY YOU EPISODES PDF#
When the story begins, Arabella is an accidental writer struggling to meet her first real deadline - she has one book to her credit, published as a PDF and titled “Chronicles of a Fed-Up Millennial,” which grew out of a series of tweets. Playing a character who’s scrambling for control of her life but refuses to see herself tragically, Coel brings a superb discipline to the portrayal of distress. “So did I,” she replies.Īnd as Arabella, she’s the embodiment of brainy, hyper-aware intensity, without the slapstick gawkiness she wielded in “Chewing Gum” but with the same riveting physical presence. “I thought you were writing about consent,” someone says to Arabella, the aspiring novelist at the center of the story. Its plot is built around a hazily remembered rape (based on Coel’s own experience), and the processes of recovery and investigation that follow.
(Sam Miller is the other director.) Beginning on Sunday, “I May Destroy You” is a coming-of-age story, a generational snapshot and a tart, tender salute to the primal value of friendship when you’re young and underemployed. The series was created by the volcanically talented British actress and writer Michaela Coel, who wrote the 12 half-hour episodes and directed some of them, too. The good news - unless a position statement is what you want from your art - is that it’s anything but. If you’ve read anything about “I May Destroy You,” it probably contained a variation on the phrase “sexual consent drama,” and maybe that made the new HBO series sound like an illustrated lecture.
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