In the same vein as Caitlin and Caroline Moran, Michaela Coel is also a writer/performer concerned with comedy and class. Her TV series, however, are intersectionally informed and explicitly focus on race, which stems from her background. Coel is the daughter of Ghanaian immigrants. She grew up in the dividing line between Hackney and Tower Hamlets with her sister and mother. Like Phoebe Waller-Bridge, Michaela Coel began in theatre with her one-woman play – Chewing Gum Dreams (2013) – which is semi-autobiographical. Unlike Waller-Bridge, however, Coel enrolled in the Guildhall School of Music and Drama in 2009, the first Black woman to be accepted in five years. She was surrounded by an overwhelming number of white and upper-middle class students, an experience exemplified during a class exercise in which ‘students whose families owned their houses went to one end of the room; those whose families didn't went to the other. Coel was the only one who went to the latter side’ ( Jung, 2020). She mixes cultural forms in straddling these disparate spaces: Ghana/Britain, Hackney/ Tower Hamlets and upper middle-class/working-class cultures.

Michaela Coel's early experiences significantly influenced her debut series and the adaptation of her first play, Chewing Gum, which premiered on the broadcaster E4 in 2015. This channel is, according to Faye Woods, ‘imbued with youthful irreverence’ (2016: 38), targeting 16–34 year olds by presenting itself as a ‘bizarre, ironic or anarchic presence within British landscapes or mundane spaces’ (ibid: 43). Chewing Gum embodies E4's ethos through its playful and comedic focus on 24-year-old Tracey Gordon (played by Coel), a naïve and sheltered shop assistant who sets out to lose her virginity. Complicating matters, Tracey lives with her strict religious mother (Shola Adewusi) and her highly strung sister, Cynthia (Susie Wokoma).