Lucy Coleman wanted to put a different kind of woman on Australian screens. She just didn’t expect it to be in a story inspired by the aftershocks that came from a violent sexual assault she experienced in her early 20s.

“I wanted to write this story because it was part reflective plus still in a very tumultuous period in my life,” she says. “And I was wanting to explore the maladaptive behaviours that had sprung from a traumatic event. I was wanting to look at the push and pull of the rage and desperation that I felt in relation to the relationships that I was having with men. So both this kind of burning rage at them and then also a desperation for their validation.

“It was just such an irreconcilable place to be in but something that, when I looked up and looked around, I wasn’t the only woman going through this. So it was me wanting to put pen to paper and explore that and put [the character of] Jacs on this journey to really be forced to look her demons in the face.”

Coleman is the creator and writer of Exposure, a mystery thriller that follows Jacs (played by Alice Englert), a 27-year-old photographer grappling with the suicide of her best friend Kel (Mia Artemis) and the discovery of a mysterious number on Kel’s phone.

Saved as “Do Not Message”, Jacs becomes convinced the person behind the number is the reason Kel committed suicide, so she uses herself as bait to lure the men Kel had contact with to try and find the person behind Do Not Message. At the same time, Jacs is struggling with her relationships with men, which have become self-destructive to say the least. “I don’t know what’s wrong with me,” she says at one point.

She’s held together, in part, by her mother (played by a tremendous Essie Davis, whose husband Justin Kurzel, of Snowtown fame, is one of the producers) and her friend Angus (Heartbreak High’s Thomas Weatherall).

If that sounds heavy – and it is – don’t turn away thinking it’s another depressing story about female trauma. Yes, it’s an unsettling watch, but it pulls the same threads as Michaela Coel’s critically acclaimed drama I May Destroy You, which explored sexual consent after a woman struggles to remember what happened on a night out.

The British series was one of a number of international shows that inspired Coleman, who wanted to look beyond the types of women usually found on Australian screens – smart but slightly daffy, likeable at all costs – and create something sharper.

“The big shows that have been so inspirational to me in the last 10 years of my life have mostly been UK or American, with that same kind of inclusive and really bold and provocative female storytelling,” she says.

“I’m rewatching Girls and it’s just fantastic. It’s incredible storytelling. And then shows like I May Destroy You, Sharp Objects, The Fall – [they are] shows that really, really dig into the hard truths of the female experience.”

I meet Coleman and the cast, as well as director Bonnie Muir and executive producers Shaun Grant and Nicole O’Donohue, on a steamy November afternoon, crammed in a back room of an art gallery in Camperdown, in Sydney’s inner west.

For a show that has such heavy themes holding it together, they are all buoyant and seemingly running on adrenaline. The gallery was a late, last-minute location find – the catering tents have been set up in the dog park around the corner – and later that night the crew will move to Carriageworks to film a night scene. Grant is even doing double duty, tapping away at the script for The Narrow Road to the Deep North, the TV adaptation of Richard Flanagan’s award-winning bestseller, while keeping an eye on filming.

Englert, meanwhile, is in the next room, shooting some of the six-part series’ final few scenes. She looks overwrought on screen, but it lifts as soon as she sits down to eat an early dinner with the crew.

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“It has that jagged edge of grief, but it also has these weird moments of just full-blown lightness,” says Englert of the show. “That feels so wrong and true at the same time, but that was what really drew me to it, its depiction of the heavy felt really, really genuine and it didn’t feel punishing.”

For Englert, best known for the TV series Dangerous Liaisons and Top of the Lake 2, directed by her mother Jane Campion, the fact the story leans all in on the character of Jacs is what she found so compelling.

“It’s deeply subjective,” she says. “And it’s completely aware of that. And it plays with that idea of something being truthful, and … then what is really behind the reason that we make that picture for ourselves, or the reason why it starts to look a certain way. It’s usually because there’s something that hasn’t been expressed yet.”

Even though the script is incredibly personal in parts – Coleman stresses she doesn’t have a friend who committed suicide, nor did she go on any type of crazed manhunt – it helped her process her feelings about her assault.

“When things feel super urgent to me, they’re the things that I want to dive into the most as a writer,” she says. “And I think this was something that I just hadn’t seen reflected on screen.

“And looking at these long, affected, maladaptive behaviours, and how humiliating and how shameful it can be, I felt such an urgency to share that with a female audience and to alleviate that loneliness.

“But yeah, then it did prove to be f---ing hard. Writing episodes one to four was the part that flowed out of me pretty ferociously because it was this character in this state of being that I knew so well ... this state of rage and desperation. But then when it hit episode five, and then I was having to really confront that trauma, and it was really hard, I was crying every day.

“It was also extremely cathartic because the first time in my life I had truly hit a point of acceptance about what happened. I mean, I had a whole show commissioned off this event and I still had to come to a full place of acceptance. So that was really quite extraordinary, to be sitting in that kind of space while all the cogs are turning and the drafts are due and the wheels are spinning, to be like, ‘Oh, holy shit, this is the first time I’m really genuinely accepting what happened.’ I think I’ll look back at that in 10 years time and be like, that was mental.”

And while Coleman is thrilled her first TV series has finally come to fruition - she also wrote and directed the AACTA-nominated microbudget film Hot Mess in 2020, and earlier this year her film Lean In won best short at Flickerfest, plus best screenplay and best actress at Venice’s short film festival – she jokes that it’s not as easy as it looks.

“You just claw and claw and claw and claw away and I definitely hope Exposure is something that now goes out to the world,” she says. “I’m feeling hopeful and excited, but, you know, it’s the film industry. I’m still also feeling completely terrified about the future of my financial stability.”

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Now she’s put herself through the emotional wringer in the name of storytelling, would Coleman recommend other women do the same?

“I think if you’ve got a story in you that you’re so desperate to tell, which is exactly where I was with Exposure, then absolutely, the world wants to hear your stories, and the world especially wants to hear female stories,” she says. “And it’s so important that complicated female stories are told, and that we’re seeing and hearing the full range of the human experience, which can be messy and shameful and humiliating and pathetic and then at the same time, can be empowering and incredible and hopeful and everything else.

“So I would say, don’t do it if you haven’t been to therapy and you haven’t got a level of self-awareness and you haven’t done at least three quarters of the processing. Then again, I say that, and I still haven’t even reached full acceptance. But I would say yes because I want to read your stories, and I want to watch your shows. And I think the connection that is created from storytelling is so vital and it only empowers women more.”

Exposure streams on Stan from June 20. Nine is the owner of Stan and this masthead.