The Golden Globes completely ignored I May Destroy You – and made it more powerful than ever
In spite of fierce competition from the muted microphones, the awkward camera cuts, Daniel Kaluuya’s refusal to be interrupted mid-acceptance speech, and Jason Sudeikis’ tie-dye hoodie, the real winner of last night’s Golden Globes was a woman who wasn’t there.
When the 2021 nominations were announced last month, the internet had an instant meltdown over the exclusion of I May Destroy You, the BBC-HBO drama series written, show-run by, and starring Michaela Coel, which tackled sexual consent, drugs and drinking culture, life as black millennial Londoner specifically, and the ethical perplexities of being a human being more generally.
Despite topping pretty much every list of the best TV shows of the year, the shadowy cabal of voters at the Hollywood Foreign Press Association – which Gary Oldman once described as “90 nobodies having a w---k” – clearly found Coel’s show a bit meh. Or perhaps they just didn’t get round to watching it. Either way, its absence from the TV categories led to the Globes itself being labelled everything from an evil abomination to a very bad joke, and the HFPA coming under increased scrutiny for its less-than-diverse make-up and shady nomination practices. Which is a pretty powerful outcome for a show that walked away empty handed.
Indeed, despite its obvious injustice, I May Destroy You’s snubbing by what is generally agreed to be the trashiest and least meritocratic prize-giving, in an awards season populated exclusively by trashy and unmeritocratic prize-givings, has only redoubled its fame and increased its prestige.
It wasn’t just that the actors and creatives who were nominated had to endure an evening of technological hiccups and mild humiliations – although it isn’t hard to imagine Coel chuckling through her popcorn as the camera cut to a frozen-smiled Lily Collins when host Tina Fey quipped that “French Exit is what I did after watching the first episode of Emily in Paris”, or at Viola Davis’s undisguised expression of utter boredom throughout. Certainly, this year’s Globes is unlikely to go down in history as a show that encouraged us to take anyone in attendance more seriously.
More importantly, excluding the work of art that did more than any other to thoughtfully and devastatingly engage with racism in the year of Black Lives Matter, one moreover written by a black woman, and starring a predominantly black cast, meant that diversity – or Hollywood’s lack of it – dominated the political jabs that have become a regular feature of awards ceremonies, despite this year’s Globes winners’ list actually proving much more diverse than usual.
Chloe Zhao beat Emerald Fennell to become the first Asian woman – and the second woman – to win Best Director, while black actors John Boyega, Daniel Kaluuya, the late Chadwick Boseman, and Andra Day all went (or rather, stayed) home with gongs. Yet thanks to Coel’s absent presence, no one behaved as though one good year had solved the centuries-old issue.
Tina Fey introduced the HFPA as “90 international no-black journalists”; Sacha Baron-Cohen thanked the “all-white Hollywood Foreign Press Association” in accepting his best actor award, while Jane Fonda used her platform on receiving a lifetime achievement award to name check I May Destroy You, call out Hollywood for shying away from its inclusion responsibilities – “There’s a story we’ve been afraid to see and hear about ourselves in this industry. The story about which voices we respect and elevate and which we tune out” – and call on everyone watching to “make an effort to expand that tent, so that everyone rises and everyone’s story has a chance to be seen and heard.” It turned out that I May Destroy You did not need a trophy to make its point.
Neither does its creator. Coel is currently in possession of more creative capital than anyone else in the industry, with the possible exception of that other titan of millennial TV drama, Phoebe Waller-Bridge. While quieter showrunners and lesser shows can benefit from the exposure brought by award nominations, the presently agent-less Coel is already assured of a blank cheque from any streaming service, studio, or TV channel she chooses to take her business to next. This is, after all, the writer to whom Netflix offered $1 million for I May Destroy You (although none of the copyright, which is why she turned them down) and that was before the show actually existed.
Moreover, Coel’s public image – off-beat, idiosyncratic, unf--kable with – can only benefit from remaining slightly apart from the cringey, commercialised freight train of awards season. She rarely gives interviews, isn’t on Twitter, and currently doesn’t have an agent, none of which suggests someone who values or takes much interest in the endless publicity junkets and internet self-abnegations required to scoop up prizes in this year’s virtual reality.
In her industry-shaking MacTaggart Lecture at the Edinburgh International Television Festival, she sliced open the structural racism and self-serving diversity efforts of the entertainment industry, exposing its “scrabbling for misfits like kids in a playground scrabbling for sweets – desperate for a chew, not sure of the taste of these sweets, these dreams, just aware they might be very profitable.” That was in 2018, before Black Lives Matter had made such statements conventional, or such stances cool. Coel doesn’t need the gaudy platform of an awards ceremony to say her bit.
Ultimately, I May Destroy Speaks for itself. Over 12 half-hour episodes, Coel’s protagonist Arabella tastes the sweetness of internet fame, of public adulation, of flurries of thumbs-ups endorsing her every word, but it does not fix her problems. Rather, it makes her a less compassionate voice, a more absent friend, a flatter individual. This is not the message of a person who needs a shiny gold gong to know her own value. In a week, few will remember this year’s Golden Globes – but no one will forget I May Destroy You, the best TV show of 2020.
