I May Destroy You’s Golden Globes Snub Raises A Larger Question: Whose Stories Are Seen As Universal?

The 2021 Golden Globe nominations were announced on Wednesday, and with them came a predictable wave of outrage over the frequently questioned award show ’s various nods and snubs. Arguably most glaring was the Hollywood Foreign Press Association’s lack of recognition for I May Destroy You, British writer Michaela Coel ’s genre-defying HBO series about a young woman struggling to right herself in the aftermath of an ill-remembered sexual assault.

There was no shortage of praise for I May Destroy You when it aired, with The New Yorker’s Doreen St. Félix calling the show “a beguiling study of friendship and casual trauma and writing as a path—albeit not a simple one—to reinvention.” Coel was already well known in Hollywood for her hilarious, inimitably written sitcom Chewing Gum, but I May Destroy You elevated her to single-name status, largely because of the unsettling tonal depths to which she was willing to sink in order to tell a genuinely original—and often laugh-out-loud funny!—story about bodily autonomy and mental health. So where, to put it simply, are her awards-season flowers?

Of course, one awards show cannot and should not cement a show’s legacy, but Coel’s snubbing by the Hollywood Foreign Press Association is particularly tough to swallow when one recalls the fanfare with which Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s Fleabag was met at the same ceremony in 2020. (Waller-Bridge’s show scored three nominations and two wins, one for best musical or comedy TV series.) It’s facile to suggest that Fleabag and I May Destroy You are of a kind just because they both center around far-reaching stories about women (and, to be fair, it took until season two for Fleabag to get its Golden Globe noms). But it’s difficult not to wonder whether Coel might be a better candidate for awards-season plaudits if her story were just a little more, well…white (or, to put it in the coded language that Hollywood execs favor, a little more universal).

One in six American women experience sexual assault in their lifetimes, meaning that in essence the story Coel is telling should be one of the most universal of all. That said, women of color are more likely to be assaulted than white women, even though 80% of rapes are reported by white women. Coel created a piece of work that addressed that reality head-on, confidently centering a Black survivor of sexual assault and shedding light on the myriad ways in which Black survivors of all genders and sexualities are likely to be disbelieved or let down by the system that purports to protect them.

The narratives around sexual assault that we see play out on TV and in movies are still weighted toward white protagonists; why is a show that so boldly breaks those barriers not commended for it at one of the industry’s highest levels? Is it possible that the Hollywood Foreign Press Association is just more comfortable seeing a woman who looks like Waller-Bridge push the boundaries of what it means to be alive, angst ridden, and female? If Coel’s story took place in a whiter, higher-income part of London, would it be easier for HFPA voters to see its merit?

The nomination of Emerald Fennell’s debut feature, Promising Young Woman, proves that the Golden Globes aren’t wholly unwilling to recognize complicated stories about women navigating the mire of sexual assault. It would be nice, though, if a voice as singular as Coel’s—one that dares to confront the audience with the blurry, unvarnished reality of recent trauma—were amplified in the same way by what’s proving to be an increasingly outdated awards system.

Maybe, then, the solution is simply to stop looking at the Golden Globes and other award shows as arbiters of objective taste and see them for what they are: institutions that are inherently limited by the same biases that permeate society at large. It would certainly mean much to see Coel toting every award under the sun for what she achieved with I May Destroy You, but her work speaks for itself. The question is: Are the institutional bodies that govern Hollywood really ready to listen?