I May Destroy You vs Emily In Paris: A Golden Globes Fiasco

Ah, awards shows. There’s nothing quite like the feeling of injustice that washes over you when your favourite film – TV show, director, actor, screenplay, score – doesn’t get the recognition you know it deserves. With the Golden Globes ceremony taking place just before voting for the Oscars nominations ends, a nod from the Globes is a big deal. This means that people tend to get very annoyed when the nominations come out.

How do I know this? Because I’m one of those people! No Best Director (or even Best Screenplay) for Get Out or Call Me By Your Name in 2018, nothing for Steve McQueen’s Widows in 2019, all the nominations thrown at Joker in 2020 – the Globes have been personally victimising me for years.

2021’s nominations, freshly released, are no different. While there were lots of well-deserved nods – Anya Taylor-Joy for The Queen’s Gambit and Emma, Emma Corrin for The Crown, Regina King, Chloé Zhao and Emerald Fennell all up for Best Director – there were also big surprises. One of the biggest? The complete shutout of Michaela Coel’s I May Destroy You (let’s refer to it as IMDY).

It’s not just the lack of nominations, although that’s bad enough. One of the biggest shows of 2020, IMDY pulls off the rare feat of being both critically acclaimed and loved by audiences. Michaela Coel (writer, co-director, executive producer and star) has created a juggernaut of a show ­– a sharp, often funny, exploration of sexual abuse, consent and the effects of trauma. It also represents a win for Coel, who had to fight to retain complete creative control of her own work, something that didn’t happen on her first series, Chewing Gum.

No, it’s the fact that Emily in Paris – Netflix’s much-watched (and much-mocked) series about a perky American abroad – has got not one but two nods from the HFPA. Its nominations, for Best TV Series, Comedy or Musical and Best Actress, are both awards that IMDY clearly deserves to be in the running for.

Naturally, this resulted in widespread fury. How was Emily in Paris, with all its fashion faux-pas, clunky dialogue and infuriating clichés, nominated and IMDY wasn’t? I might be biased but then again, when comedian Abby Govindan claimed to be Emily’s creator and tweeted “I made that show as a prank”, the world believed her! Is it any wonder, in a series where main character Emily – a supposed social-media sensation – posts a photo of a few women smoking post-workout with the hashtags “#Frenchworkout #Smokin’bodies” and gains thousands of Instagram followers? (Nothing will convince me that this show isn’t an elaborate form of satire).

Even Emily in Paris writer Deborah Copaken was up in arms, to the extent where she penned a piece on IMDY’s snub. “That I May Destroy You did not get one Golden Globe nod is not only wrong, it’s what is wrong with everything,” she wrote. Even more interesting was her acknowledgement of the criticism Emily had faced – “I could definitely see how a show about a white American selling luxury whiteness, in a pre-pandemic Paris scrubbed free of its vibrant African and Muslim communities, might rankle”. Emily in Paris may have been breaking records but it was hugely divisive, for these reasons and more. People weren’t just bingeing it, they were hate-watching it – and this meant the viewing figures were huge.

What does this tell us about the film industry? Does it mean we’d rather watch dramas that seem tailor-made for light mockery, rather than whip-smart, tightly-written stories? Not necessarily, but that’s what the studios that finance them hear. The buzz around Emily wasn’t all positive but it was exactly that – buzz. Why wouldn’t Netflix commission another season when it’s all anyone was talking about for months?

Now, I’m not saying that Emily in Paris (pronounced ‘Emily in Pa-ree’, by the way) wasn’t entertaining, because it was – in a predictable, surface-level way that usually came with a side of second-hand embarrassment. But regardless of whether you think it deserves a Globes nomination – for excellence in television – you can’t argue with the fact that IMDY should have been right there beside it. For me, excellence means getting under the skin of a story, or exploring something previously untouched, maybe leading familiar beats into uncharted waters – IMDY did all this and more. For that, it deserves to be celebrated.

There’s light at the end of the (golden) tunnel, though. After the Globes debacle came the Screen Actors Guild Awards announcements and Michaela Coel finally got a nomination – Outstanding Performance by a Female Actor (in a Television Movie or Miniseries). The start of some much-needed recognition? Let’s hope so. And until then? I May Destroy…The Golden Globes. Maybe.

Miranda Parkinson

Tweet to @pandoraparki

Featured image courtesy of jdeeringdavis via Wikimedia Commons. Image licence can be found here. No changes were made to this image.