I’ve watched some great stuff in lockdown. Save Me was incredible, the latest series of Unforgotten was fabulous, Killing Eve 3 was brilliant fun though spiralled a bit at the end, White Lines was sublime… I’m kidding. White Lines was crazy shite, but I enjoyed it anyway. What else? Normal People was, I would say, wonderful in its own way, which was a kind of beautiful, meaningful monotony. I like that twelve-part structure though; gives a show much-needed time to breathe. Which brings me to I May Destroy You, which has pretty much destroyed me this week. There is nothing monotonous about Michaela Coel’s dazzling twelve-episode drama, which bursts through the door and saunters into the room taking a drag on its fag, leaving you nowhere else to look. I was hooked from the moment Arabella’s insouciant-pink hair appeared on screen.

We’re in central London, grimy and heaving, vibrantly colourful and tarmac-grey at the same time. The noise, narrow streets and close-up single-camera box you in - everything heightened, a volley on the senses. Arabella is no innocent, nothing like Chewing Gum’s Tracey, Michaela’s previous virginal creation. With a disinterested dealer boyfriend in Italy, she’s an enthusiastic drug user and flaky writer who, despite a pressing deadline, bunks off work to go on a bender. Then everything goes fuzzy round the edges, and when she wakes the next morning, it’s with brief, shattering flares of the night before. ‘You can’t call it a memory,’ she corrects the policewoman who takes her statement. The vision of the man above her in the toilet cubicle doesn’t sit in her brain in that way – not a dream or recollection, but a camera-flash that’s gone before the image can develop into anything distinct.

At the referral unit, Arabella lines up with a bunch of other women, all in their hospital robes. That in itself is an arrestingly brutal visual, but we’re pushed further, shown a woman with a huge bloodstain at the front of her gown. When Arabella says it’s her first time there, the woman gives her a friendly grimace: ‘Really? Oops!’ Her casual, seen-it-all tone is chilling. So many women have been there before.

Given its subject - sexual consent, rape, and the areas in between - you’d think that this would be a grim watch, but the weird thing is that it’s intensely, hypnotically entertaining, funny and even flippant at times. ‘Hmm,’ muses Arabella, gripping her bedroom doorknob as the first flashback of her thrusting assailant surfaces. There’s a moment at the end of episode two, when her best mate, struggling actress Terry, sobs after Bella tells them she was spiked and attacked. ‘Was it really that bad?’ asks their friend Kwame. ‘What?’ ‘Your audition.’ ‘Yeah, I was really shit,’ Terry replies, with a defeated sigh. Bella sleeps through it, her smashed phone held aloft in her hand. The punches are all the more powerful, pulled by these moments of levity.

Of all the great shows I’ve watched lately, I May Destroy You is unquestionably the most piercing, nuanced and charismatic, made all the more potent by its dark, uncompromising humour. Also, by the fact that it doesn’t let its central narrative blot out everything else. The series is about friendship, careers, relationships, romance – all allowed to bloom or wane alongside the fallout from the incident. Arabella won’t be defined by her assault, determined to ensure it doesn’t destroy or diminish her, remaining a flawed force of nature – infuriatingly, messily, endearingly real.

Each episode is under thirty minutes – a brisk and blistering rug-from-under-your-feet half-hour of perfectly-judged and eked-out television. Watch, but beware the warning in the title.

• I May Destroy You – BBC One/HBO, 12 episodes