I May Destroy You

Michaela Coel's I May Destroy You launched on BBC One and HBO in June 2020 and won three BAFTAs in 2021 (Best Leading Actress, Best Mini-Series and Best Writer (Coel)) alongside the Emmy for Outstanding Writing for a Limited Series. The series consolidated Coel, who had emerged with her earlier Chewing Gum, as one of the most internationally consequential British writer-performer-creators of her generation. Coel had been the showrunner, central performer, co-director and primary writer of the entire series.

Arabella (Coel) is a bright, messy young London writer working on her second book, who one night is drugged and assaulted in a nightclub. The series follows her processing of the experience across twelve episodes, through her friendships with her best friend Terry (Weruche Opia), her gay friend Kwame (Paapa Essiedu), her professional life, her social-media engagement, and her gradual recovery. The series's structural commitment to refusing the conventional victim-narrative arc (including direct engagement with how Arabella's own friends have experienced violations they had not previously named) became one of its most-discussed structural achievements.

Coel had reportedly been offered $1 million by Netflix for the script and turned it down to pursue the project on a partnership-with-the-BBC basis that gave her full creative control. The decision became part of the broader continuing conversation about creator-ownership in 2020s prestige television. The series's twelfth-episode structure (staging multiple alternative scenarios for the same evening) is one of the most-cited final-episode achievements in recent prestige drama.