I May Destroy You moved like an earthquake, rumbling and ruining and breaking things apart. The limited series—written, codirected, and produced by Michaela Coel, who also starred in it—was a layered portrait of the creator’s experience with sexual assault and its traumatic aftermath. At this year’s Emmy Awards, the HBO-BBC show was nominated in nine categories, a sign that TV Academy voters had been paying attention to Coel’s unbelievably empathetic series and were preparing to recognize her achievement—perhaps in the same way they had previously recognized multihyphenates like Dan Levy and Phoebe Waller-Bridge. But as Emmys 2021 night drew to a close, the limited series was repeatedly snubbed, with Coel walking away with one statuette (best writing for a limited series) in a year when she should have, without question, swept every single one of her categories.
I May Destroy You, which was nominated for best limited series, best writing for a limited series, and best directing for a limited series, among others, primarily lost out to Mare of Easttown and The Queen’s Gambit. Both competitors were wildly popular: Mare, with its thrilling twists and turns, was a dark spring smash for HBO, while Gambit became Netflix’s most watched limited series ever. But neither show navigated the same trenchant, autofictional terrain as I May Destroy You, which Coel wrote after being drugged and sexually assaulted by two men while writing the second season of her first hit show, the bubbly comedy Chewing Gum.
The resulting show is staggering, a 12-episode odyssey into the psyche of Coel’s character, Arabella, whom she plays with equal parts wry humor and shuddering devastation. All along the way, Coel dives into the gray areas surrounding consent and misconduct, asking the audience uncomfortable questions that defy easy answers. The series ends not with revenge, but with “radical empathy,” as Coel has put it, moving toward love and healing in extraordinarily unexpected ways. Behind the scenes Coel spoke candidly about declining a $1 million offer from Netflix for the show and firing her U.S. agency after the streamer refused to give her any ownership over her extremely personal story.
In many ways there were few shows more urgent than I May Destroy You when it debuted last summer, both in terms of what it was doing narratively and what Coel was modeling for others as she navigated the industry and retained creative autonomy. When the show finally dropped, its reception was warm and widespread, and the critical consensus was clear: There has never been anything like this before.
In recent years Emmy voters have chosen to recognize zeitgeist-capturing multihyphenates with armfuls of statuettes. Who can forget Phoebe Waller-Bridge picking up three well-deserved Emmys for the searing second season of her dramedy Fleabag in 2019? Or just last year, when Schitt’s Creek cocreator and star Dan Levy picked up four statuettes, including best comedy, for the final season of his beloved series? Emmy voters love to lavish certain creators with awards, recognizing their respective faculties for writing and directing and acting and producing all at once. It’s not always the case, of course; similarly hyped TV auteur Lena Dunham never won an Emmy for Girls (though there was always a cloud of controversy swirling around her), while later creator Aziz Ansari won two, in two separate years, for Master of None, and Donald Glover won two in 2017 with Atlanta.
Coel, however, seemed destined to be the next big winner in this vein, especially after being snubbed by the Golden Globes—a glaring oversight from the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, a group that seemed determined to dash its dwindling influence this year. Instead, Coel picked up one statuette at Sunday’s Emmy ceremony, for best writing. Her win was historic, making her the first Black woman to win the category. It was also a respite from an overwhelmingly white night of winners. Though this year’s nominee pool was inclusive, every acting award was ultimately handed to a white performer, while a majority of the other awards were given to white writers, directors, and producers.
Coel accepted with aplomb, delivering a succinct (ahem) speech in which she urged writers to “write the tale that scares you, that makes you feel uncertain, that is uncomfortable. I dare you.”
She ended it by dedicating her speech to “every single survivor of sexual assault.”
Coel’s speech reflected what made her own series so resonant. That, in turn, made it all the more confounding to see the Academy repeatedly overlook one of the most staggering shows of the year—not least because, at their most altruistic, awards shows amplify works that might have been overlooked by TV viewers who reflexively reach for the safe thing, or the thing with the biggest marketing budget and the biggest stars. A sweep for I May Destroy You would have felt like a clarion call belying the poignant urgency of the series. Instead, Academy voters looked elsewhere.
Neither Coel nor I May Destroy You, to be clear, needs Emmys. The show’s value isn’t measured by the gold it accrues; Coel has also already been given the breakthrough-auteur treatment by the industry at large, landing a slew of magazine covers and a mysterious role in the Black Panther sequel. Rather, it’s the TV Academy and the wider industry that need creators like Coel—visionaries who see beyond what is possible and instead reach for the unknown, widening the boundaries of modern episodic storytelling.
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