The pandering of mainstream TV sure, makes for a nice blanket of familiarity, but it tends to pervade the entirety of the medium, becoming an echo chamber of the same old ideas, just told in slightly novel ways. I’ll readily acknowledge, I don’t feel like I’m particularly the target demographic for the show, but the thing about it is this: the show isn’t made for a demographic, Coel is driven to tell this story as a means of creative expression rather than to please people or to make some money. What does it mean to be a woman? What does it mean to be black? Coel weaves so many ideas, themes and experiences into the slim 12-episode show, its more than most shows can do in 5 seasons. There are characters who feel the weight of isolation in the modern world, who feed off the toxic para-social relationships built from social media influence, and then there are explorations of femininity, sex, gender, class and race.
#James duckworth vs karen khachanov series#
I tend to value films that have a timeless quality over timely: political issue-films often become dated just a few years after they’re released, but Coel in this series manages to tap into both timelessness and timeliness. Episode 6 is my personal favourite, it’s a complex exploration of false accusations of sexual assault, Coel instead of indicting or playing partisan, always cleverly shows us (never telling us) how these characters think, their motivations, their demons and their failures. Don’t let it deter you, the second episode naturally fleshes everything out that happened in the pilot, and it only gets better from there. I never judge a series by its pilot episode, but this does buckle under the weight of needing to set up each of the plotlines, characters and relationships, and isn’t quite as engaging an episode as I would have liked. There isn’t a great deal to fault in this 12-episode series, however I did find that the pilot and the finale weren’t quite as tight as they needed to be. But they aren’t there for shock-value, they’re intelligently explored, bringing balanced perspectives with fascinating character dynamics. There are scenes of sex with period blood clots, rapes, pegging, and faked sexual assaults.
I May Destroy You just goes all-out and never even looks back. HBO’s Euphoria and Netflix’s Sex Education seem to give an inkling of real issues in the lives of young people in the modern world, but they never quite rise above staple comedy or teen drama.
Mainstream television (yes, I’m looking at you: The Office, Stranger Things, Suits etc.) never even touches the surface of these everyday things that are taboo in the realm of filmmaking. This is a show that is so uncompromising, and so original, that it's quite strange to compare it to the normal, sanitised television we are so accustomed to. I don’t want to give too much of the plotting away, because experiencing the twists and turns of this series is a real pleasure. The premise is not what the show is actually about, it’s a basic line from which to hang the powerful experiences and stories that Coel needs to tell. It doesn’t really matter if you’re not interested by the premise of the show, the weight of experience, fragility and truth propel this show into the stratosphere of great filmmaking. It follows the life of Arabella Essiedu, a Rupi Kaur-type Twitter writer (but less hackneyed) who lands a book deal with a publishing house. Her new series, I May Destroy You, truly feels like a kind of revolutionary, watershed moment for television, and more broadly, filmmaking. Michaela Coel is one of the most surprising, uncompromising and powerful filmmakers that I have seen in the past few years.