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Live TV is available in the 50 United States and the District of Columbia only. For personal and non-commercial use only. It remains the one story that goes on, without end, pulsing through your blood like a strange new oxygen, something you learn to carry but never set down.7-day free trial for Live TV and 30-day free trial for Add-Ons valid for new and eligible existing subscribers only. But for a writer, someone who’s accustomed to wrestling stories to the ground, giving them a beginning, a middle, and an end, the shattering effects of sexual assault may prove too difficult to deconstruct and repackage in a way that makes sense. As anyone who’s experienced trauma knows, it lives both as a visceral force and as a story you tell yourself. So, too, does the show’s conclusion, a narrative departure that dives into the meta layer of Arabella’s work as a writer.
In current-day scenes around the dinner table, the dynamics among Arabella, her mom, her brother, and her dad are rendered so delicately, through small gestures, looks, and words unsaid, that the episode lingers long after the series is done. It explores the notion of consent from a different angle - what kind of treatment we deem acceptable from parents or siblings that we might never allow in a different kind of relationship. Through flashbacks to her childhood, it reveals a mother and daughter captivated by an absentee father, a man of the house who was never around, but around whom the house turned nevertheless. The most bittersweet episode offers a snapshot of Arabella’s family. The experience leaves him so shamed, he ricochets into an ill-advised experiment to sleep with a woman, then into celibacy, then back into promiscuity. You can practically see the confidence leave his body like air from a balloon, his shoulders slumping and his eyes turning downcast, as the police treat him with skepticism and embarrassment, eventually dismissing his claim (a doubling of victimhood that stands in stark contrast to the care with which female detectives treat Arabella). In one heartbreaking scene, Kwame becomes emboldened to report his own encounter with nonconsensual sex - a Grindr meetup that turned ugly. In moments big and small, the show illustrates how we parcel away trauma. She allows them to own their sexuality, to say stupid shit, to let down their friends, to make mistakes and still be worthy of love, a gift we often don’t give even to ourselves.
With uncommon sensitivity, Coel writes each character as a full, flesh-and-blood human exploring and testing all the bounds of that experience. Nor their friend Kwame, who subsumes his desire for real connection in a parade of Grindr encounters. Nor does it judge her childhood bestie Terry, who ditches a drunk Arabella on an Italian vacation to have a threesome with two men.
This is a setup that practically baits the audience to judge Arabella, given the fate that befalls her. In the course of the first episode, she smokes joints, snorts coke, and does shots, all with a looming 6 AM deadline for a draft of her second book. She’s also unfettered when it comes to partying. Her first work, Chronicles of a Fed-Up Millennial, has enough of a following that giddy fans approach her on the street. We learn quickly that she’s exuberant, charismatic, and something of a celebrity, one of the many young people who’ve ridden a popular Twitter feed to a book deal. We meet Arabella - pink hair, retro-Nineties clothes - on the day of her assault. (To American ears, the staccato pitter-patter of the actors’ English accents may be tough to catch up with at first, too.) But Coel is magnetic, and I May Destroy You doesn’t flinch from asking tough questions about consent, responsibility, and the twisted shape of love. There’s a lot going on here - so much that, in the early installments, the show can be challenging to follow.