They’re also at different points in their recovery from sexual assault, a trauma Arabella undergoes in the premiere during an incident modeled after Coel’s real life. Arabella and Michaela aren’t just at different points in their careers. In I May Destroy You, however, the gap between character and creator serves a more poignant purpose. More can relate to stories about entertainers’ lower-functioning, often younger selves. Few people want to watch a show about the high-class problems of performers not named Larry David. Conflict is more interesting than prosperity. For pure pragmatism’s sake, the difference makes sense. Hannah Horvath in Girls Abbi and Ilana in Broad City Issa in Insecure Ramy in Ramy: all of these antiheroes are modeled after, and often conflated with, the people who portray them, but they’re just missing the drive, luck, and success that got those creators’ personae on screen in the first place. It’s a dynamic increasingly common in I May Destroy You’s crowded niche-self-styled star vehicles that take the auteur approach to TV half hours. Coel, by contrast is at the helm of her second TV show. When the story starts, Arabella is at sea, unable to write the novel she’s contracted to write for a prestigious publishing house and procrastinating with free trips to Italy. Both are writers who found early success by drawing on their own biographies.īut Arabella is also not Michaela, a truism that highlights an important distinction. Both are the daughters of West African mothers and both attended rough-and-tumble Catholic schools. Both Arabella and Michaela are Londoners who grew up in public housing. The protagonist of I May Destroy You shares a great deal with her creator Michaela Coel, who also plays her on the show. The case of Arabella Essiedu is a common kind of paradox.
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