Atlanta has always felt like the future, so it’s a telling sign of the times that it already feels like a step backwards. Donald Glover’s ambitious, surreal, unpredictable half-hour comeback returns Thursday after nearly four years off-air. During this time, hardly anyone involved was idle. Star Brian Tyree Henry is now a Marvel superhero who worked with Barry Jenkins. Breakout performer Lakeith Stanfield is an Oscar nominee. Director Hiro Murai established the visual style of Station Eleven, the opulent post-apocalyptic series that envisions the art after the end of the world. Glover, always the polymath, worked hard. Along with much of the Atlanta Brain Trust, he released the special Guava Island on Amazon Prime Video in 2019, published by Rihanna; Later this year he will star in a Mr. and Mrs. Smith reboot for the same streaming service.
After Atlanta’s rapturous acclaim has rightfully boosted all of their careers, it’s downright bewildering to see the cast resume their roles as supporting players in the larger rap scene. (Henry plays Alfred, an up-and-coming rapper who goes by the moniker Paper Boi; Glover plays Earn, Alfred’s cousin and questionably effective manager.) The characters are the same, but so much in the real world is different — even where many Viewers will do Watch the show. Following Disney’s 2019 acquisition of Fox’s entertainment assets, including Atlanta Network FX, FX has been largely integrated into Hulu’s catalog. There you can now watch all 21 episodes of Atlanta to date leading up to this week’s double episode premiere.
The Streaming Wars were prepared in Atlanta’s absence, but the culture also evolved in less tangible ways than the spread. No show has yet reproduced Atlanta’s chameleonic tone: part social realism, part satire, part dream logic, part horror. Nonetheless, many networks seem more inclined to make major changes in projects that deviate from conventional structures and channel historically marginalized viewpoints. In 2018, HBO aired the first season of Random Acts of Flyness, artist and filmmaker Terence Nance’s experimental variety show; Atlanta’s own FX has since produced Reservation Dogs, a gritty but lyrical sitcom about Indigenous teenagers coming of age in Oklahoma. These shows clearly follow in Atlanta’s footsteps but never overshadow it.
There’s also the uncomfortable influence of events outside the scope of mere television. Glover has described the goal of the Atlanta creative team — a tight-knit, tight-knit group that includes Murai, Glover’s brother Stephen and executive producer Stefani Robinson — as “to show people what it’s like to be Black.” . In the wake of the killing of George Floyd and the protests that followed, this sentiment has become the subject of increasing mainstream interest. Issues like police brutality predate Atlanta’s existence and will continue after it blows off the air. Still, the last two years have left the distinct impression of a culture, or at least parts of it, finally acknowledging what creators like Atlanta’s have known all along.
Atlanta faces sky-high hype from a revered company that has managed to weather a second-year slump. Stuck in the same situation last year, even Succession began to show signs of strain. Perhaps for the best, given that snowball pressure, Glover has signaled that he doesn’t intend to outdo himself forever, or even try to: Atlanta will end with Season 4, which was filmed concurrently with Season 3. Atlanta is already over. Just when we’re most looking forward to welcoming it back, the show has begun its long goodbye.
While not technically an anthology show, Atlanta thrives on novelty. There’s no telling which character an episode might highlight (Alfred’s faithful sidekick Darius; Earn’s ex-girlfriend Van), or where it might take place (Drake’s mansion; a haunted house), or what genre it might take (screwball caper; breakup drama). . As a result, it’s difficult to review the show in advance lest this writing spoil Atlanta’s central appeal.
Still, Atlanta is keenly aware that his own reputation precedes him, and the first episode of season 3 ups the ante and plays with our assumptions. Atlanta has left its core cast behind before, most notably in the ’90s flashback episode “FUBU,” which follows Earn and Alfred as high school hitters. But it never quite leaves its main characters behind like in “Three Slaps,” a sort of topical creepypasta that takes its plot from a real-life nightmare scenario in which a white lesbian couple abuse their black foster children.
In a way, “Three Slaps” is proof that Atlanta is still recognizable as itself – funny, melancholic, a little kinky – even if it doesn’t depict Alfred’s rise to fame. But refusing to give us the Earn and Al update we’ve been waiting for is also an undeniable troll. The episode’s own description quips, “I mean, I like this episode about the troubled kid, but have we waited 50 years for this?” As much as the tension in “Three Slaps” stems from the young protagonist’s attempts to come to terms with his ordeal unscathed escape, the episode gets an added boost from our nagging angst about what happened when Earn planted a gun on Al’s European tour headliner. We know they made it onto the plane unscathed, but then what? What about Van or her and Earn’s baby daughter?
But of course, Atlanta was never driven by its act. One of the wisest and most surprising actions Glover and his associates took was to treat Al’s increasing success almost as an inevitability. Paper Boi’s career takes place in the background and exists mainly to allow for the absurd scenarios in which Alfred and his circle end up. Regardless, FX doesn’t make us wait long to find out; perhaps knowing that fans might riot if forced to wait another week, the network programmed “Sinterklaas Is Coming to Town” immediately afterwards. Aside from the fact that it’s technically the second chapter of the season, “Sinterklaas” is every bit the traditional premiere of “Three Slaps,” which follows the gang on a trip to Amsterdam about a year after Al’s first trip abroad. This time he’s the headliner.
“Three Slaps” and “Sinterklaas” literally take the show to new places, be it the nursing home system of Atlanta or the canals of Amsterdam. (Atlanta may love to break with form, but a trip abroad is a classic late-period inflection. It’s like Carrie going to Paris!) However, they also show that Atlanta is now mature enough to revisit familiar themes . “Three Slaps” has the same sense of creeping uneasiness as “Teddy Perkins,” the masterpiece in which fame and abuse breed a literal monster; “Sinterklaas” recalls the spooky German festival Van and Earn attend in “Helen” with its use of the folk character of the same name and his troubled sidekick Zwarte Piet. Both episodes use European iconography to portray white people as exotic and bizarre as black culture is often portrayed in popular media.
These echoes don’t mean that Atlanta has resorted to the hits; No show that begins by turning its nose at expectations like “Three Slaps” does can be called a crowd pleaser. However, they suggest that not every episode will shock and disarm, such as “BAN,” an entire standalone episode of a fictional public-access talk show. Atlanta’s work is now large enough to delve into the self-referential. Even with so much of pop culture trying to emulate it, Atlanta still wants to be most like itself.
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