Television series

I May Destroy You

Michaela Coel's era-defining drama-comedy follows Arabella, a young London writer piecing together the night she was drugged and raped, and the friends orbiting her who are just as tangled up in consent, desire and self-deception. It swerves from farce to horror to tenderness within a single scene. Formally daring and morally exacting — not comfort viewing, but essential.

TVMaze rating6.1

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Fleabag2016

Same trick of using confessional comedy to smuggle real grief and shame past your defences, with a narrator who breaks the fourth wall to charm you even as she's unravelling. Sharp, filthy, unexpectedly wrecking.

But If you want the racier subject matter treated with the same gravity IMDY gives it, this stays lighter and more contained.

Fleabag poster

Unbelievable2019

A precise, furious procedural about a rape investigation and the detectives who actually listen, adapted from a real case that shows how belief itself becomes the battleground. Devastating and clear-eyed.

But It's a conventional true-crime structure with none of IMDY's formal playfulness or comic relief.

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Normal People2020

Same year, same island, a different register entirely — an aching, unbearably intimate study of consent, power and communication failure inside young love, told almost entirely in bodies and silences.

But It's romantic where IMDY is confrontational; if you want anger and humour, this is quieter and sadder.

Normal People poster

The wildcard

Something you would not have found on your own.

Marvel's Jessica Jones2015

Kilgrave's mind control is a literal, garish version of the same violation IMDY treats realistically — both shows ask what's left of consent when someone else has been inside your head, and both follow a woman piecing her sense of self back together afterward.

A hard-drinking private eye with super-strength, hunting a man who can control minds — Marvel's noir show is secretly one of the sharpest screen studies of rape trauma and coercive control ever made.

But You have to accept the superhero furniture — capes, villains, a shared universe — around a genuinely serious subject.

Marvel's Jessica Jones poster
More like this (8)

Insecure2016

Issa Rae's warm, sharply funny portrait of a woman and her best friend fumbling through careers, sex and identity, with the same gift for turning a scene from comedy to ache without warning.

But Lower stakes and gentler tone throughout — it's a hangout show first, a drama second.

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Sharp Objects2018

Amy Adams as a journalist unravelling her own trauma while reporting on violence against women in her hometown; woozy, fractured editing that mirrors a mind refusing to remember cleanly.

But Glacially paced and deliberately oppressive — it wants to make you as uncomfortable as its heroine, for hours.

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Big Little Lies2017

Starry, glossy, and underneath the Monterey gloss, a real reckoning with domestic abuse and the lies women tell each other and themselves to survive it.

But The soap-opera sheen and celebrity wattage sit oddly against the seriousness of what it's depicting.

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Chewing Gum2015

Michaela Coel's first show, a broad, filthy, brilliantly silly sitcom about a virgin trying to have sex for the first time — see where her voice started before it got this dark.

But Pure comedy, almost none of IMDY's weight; a strange comedown if you're after more of the same intensity.

Chewing Gum poster

Euphoria2019

Teenagers, drugs, sex and consent rendered in hallucinatory neon visuals — the same interest in how trauma warps memory and narration, pushed into pure sensory overload.

But Younger, glossier, more interested in style than in the ethical clarity IMDY insists on.

Euphoria poster

Random Acts of Flyness2018

Terence Nance's genre-scrambling anthology about race, sex and American life, as formally fearless as IMDY, mixing sketch, dream and documentary in a way few shows dare.

But Deliberately disorienting and abstract — it won't hold your hand, and some segments land harder than others.

Random Acts of Flyness poster

The Accused1988

Both refuse to let the audience look away from what happened or from the machinery — legal, social — that decides whose account of an assault gets to count.

Jodie Foster won an Oscar playing a gang-rape survivor fighting to be believed in court, decades before "believe women" was a phrase — blunt, angry, unflinching studio filmmaking.

But Dated in places, and its courtroom mechanics are far more conventional than anything IMDY attempts.

The Accused poster

Audrie & Daisy2016

IMDY's plot turns partly on digital exposure and who controls a story once it's public; this documentary shows that exact mechanism destroying real teenagers, stripped of any narrative safety net.

A documentary following two American teenagers assaulted and then publicly shamed online, told with real families instead of actors — the same collision of sex, social media and disbelief IMDY dramatizes, but unbearably real.

But No fictional distance to soften it, and the outcomes are far bleaker than anything scripted.

Audrie & Daisy poster

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