The awards are going to rain down on this series, which has attracted a few comments already on the rolling thread. i think it deserves its own.
It's hard to describe what it's like. The story of a small group of friends doing very modern things in a metropolis, it's clearly indebted to Sex and the city, but with all the content scooped out and replaced with something that couldn't be more different, short of being about a convent in the countryside. It is, broadly, about living through and after a sexual assault, about young Black people subverting and fighting back against white supremacy. And it's a comedy. And it's preachy. And it wants to make a sort of generational statement, a sign of our times. Ambitious, then.
It's the most compelling, provocative, annoying, brilliant programme i've seen in as long as i can remember.
It is not for the faint-hearted. There are multiple rapes, scenes of drug abuse and micro-aggressions galore.
It is not afraid of a fight. The themes of episodes 6 and 7 are right out of the Daily Mail, and will have you huffing and puffing and preparing a stiff letter of complaint to the BBC.
And it's hard to follow at times. Characters come and go, the material digresses and meanders and takes its sweet time. At the same time, it surges along, fed by a constant stream of new takes, angles, 'content', like the twitter feeds that have made its central character into a celebrity.
But in the background, holding everything together, is a classical story of friendship and solidarity. This is a world almost without family; parents are dismissed in a line or two; they are not repudiated, they simply exist elsewhere. This is not their story. At times we are in a fairy tale. A horror movie. All that Arabella, the heroine, has to guide her to safety are her faith and her friends. Her faith in her friends. At times we are in a sermon, too.
Morality is everywhere, and like Arabella it points in several directions at once. Getting off your face is an inalienable right. It's also a crutch we shouldn't need. Writing confessional stories is cathartic, exploitative, liberating, triggering, it connects you, it makes you feel lonelier than ever. What kind of person do we need to be to drive a way through these contradictions, a way that will allow us to live with ourselves afterwards?
And Arabella is a particular kind of person, a young Black woman. She's from Hackney and in Hackney, and those are two different places since she has become famous: the first, the inner city neighbourhood of her childhood; the second, a hipster hangout where she mingles with smug publishers and smart businesswomen. She mingles but never quite fits in, and this, together with her steely pride and determination to be true to her roots, will be the making of her. We hope.
Michaela Coel is fucking sensational as Arabella; that is not up for debate. The shifts in tone in the script are extreme and it's her performance that accomplishes them. And the writing is sensational too – it's also by Michaela Coel. She might be quite talented.
Above all it really does feel like the story of now. It's going to be compared with Fleabag – dark comedy, female writer-performer, says something about the times, very well made – but this resonates with me far more, even if i have no idea what they're on about for much of the time, and the text messages flick on and off the screen far too quickly for these tired old eyes to read. As i was preparing to inform the editor of the Daily Mail, before i changed my mind.
It's hard to describe what it's like. The story of a small group of friends doing very modern things in a metropolis, it's clearly indebted to Sex and the city, but with all the content scooped out and replaced with something that couldn't be more different, short of being about a convent in the countryside. It is, broadly, about living through and after a sexual assault, about young Black people subverting and fighting back against white supremacy. And it's a comedy. And it's preachy. And it wants to make a sort of generational statement, a sign of our times. Ambitious, then.
It's the most compelling, provocative, annoying, brilliant programme i've seen in as long as i can remember.
It is not for the faint-hearted. There are multiple rapes, scenes of drug abuse and micro-aggressions galore.
It is not afraid of a fight. The themes of episodes 6 and 7 are right out of the Daily Mail, and will have you huffing and puffing and preparing a stiff letter of complaint to the BBC.
And it's hard to follow at times. Characters come and go, the material digresses and meanders and takes its sweet time. At the same time, it surges along, fed by a constant stream of new takes, angles, 'content', like the twitter feeds that have made its central character into a celebrity.
But in the background, holding everything together, is a classical story of friendship and solidarity. This is a world almost without family; parents are dismissed in a line or two; they are not repudiated, they simply exist elsewhere. This is not their story. At times we are in a fairy tale. A horror movie. All that Arabella, the heroine, has to guide her to safety are her faith and her friends. Her faith in her friends. At times we are in a sermon, too.
Morality is everywhere, and like Arabella it points in several directions at once. Getting off your face is an inalienable right. It's also a crutch we shouldn't need. Writing confessional stories is cathartic, exploitative, liberating, triggering, it connects you, it makes you feel lonelier than ever. What kind of person do we need to be to drive a way through these contradictions, a way that will allow us to live with ourselves afterwards?
And Arabella is a particular kind of person, a young Black woman. She's from Hackney and in Hackney, and those are two different places since she has become famous: the first, the inner city neighbourhood of her childhood; the second, a hipster hangout where she mingles with smug publishers and smart businesswomen. She mingles but never quite fits in, and this, together with her steely pride and determination to be true to her roots, will be the making of her. We hope.
Michaela Coel is fucking sensational as Arabella; that is not up for debate. The shifts in tone in the script are extreme and it's her performance that accomplishes them. And the writing is sensational too – it's also by Michaela Coel. She might be quite talented.
Above all it really does feel like the story of now. It's going to be compared with Fleabag – dark comedy, female writer-performer, says something about the times, very well made – but this resonates with me far more, even if i have no idea what they're on about for much of the time, and the text messages flick on and off the screen far too quickly for these tired old eyes to read. As i was preparing to inform the editor of the Daily Mail, before i changed my mind.
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