Atlanta’s third season, which comes out four years after the last, is set almost entirely in Europe. This is the first of the show’s many ironies, a clever joke of geography that reminds audiences in case they’ve forgotten: Atlanta is bigger than a place. It’s a mindset.
Donald Glover’s FX series, which returns this week with two new episodes, centers on Earn Marks (Glover) as he convinces his cousin, rapper Alfred “Paper Boi” Miles (Brian Tyree Henry), to let him be his manager to let become. The dark comedy follows the couple and their friends Van (Zazie Beetz) and Darius (LaKeith Stanfield) as their fortunes in the music industry rise, but also frequently diverts to focus on their personal lives or a strange place. Like season 2’s standout “Teddy Perkins,” in which Darius picks up a free piano from the character of the same name, Darius is a reclusive Michael Jackson stand-in who the cast claimed was a real person, though it has been confirmed that Perkins Prosthetics and make-up were played by Glover himself.
During the show’s first two seasons, Atlanta expanded its scope to include just about anything — a BET spoof with fake commercials, a short story about middle school students, or an episode where the cast wrestled with a black Justin Bieber. The season three premiere, “Three Slaps,” immediately reaffirms Atlanta’s freeform structure: There’s no regular cast at all. Instead, it tells a story about a little boy named Loquareeous who gets shoved into the foster care system and ends up in the care of a white lesbian couple who don’t seem to care that much about him.
Photo: Guy D’Alema/FX
Then, in the next episode, it’s back to business as usual with Earn & Co. in Copenhagen as Paper Boi embark on their first major European tour, only to discover the local tradition of dressing up as Zwarte Piet – aka Black Pete ‘, a black-faced Christmas character who helps Saint Nick deliver toys. This is in contrast to the overwhelming friendliness with which the locals greet them (in one scene, Paper Boi, who is being held in prison after an off-screen altercation, is stunned by how nice his quarters are and asks if he despite his being able to stay for a while longer on bail), leaves her stunned by the racist depictions and embarks on what is no doubt a strange journey across Europe.
Atlanta’s malleable and often surreal nature — this is a series where invisible cars and ghostly characters can and do appear — makes it difficult to summarize what it’s about. But the Atlanta mindset is simple: It’s about how strange the world is when you pay attention to race, when you pay attention to skin color, and how the world around you distorts. To put it more bluntly, it’s a show for white people to tilt the world in all directions and see if they’ll do the work to embrace that mindset, while remaining willfully opaque enough because nothing should be handed to them.
As Atlanta demonstrated over two short seasons and earlier this season, in a world where it’s often denied, centering race creates a disturbing dissonance. It means stepping back from your reflection and realizing that you have actually been staring into a funfair mirror the whole time – you don’t really look like it, the world doesn’t look like it, but we did it. It’s scary, it’s absurd, and it’s funny, and the reality of Atlanta is distorted to emphasize that. In each episode, a small decision can grow into a full-blown odyssey, as in the second episode of this week’s premiere, where Van’s search for a cloak leads her and Darius to a light-hearted death cult meeting.
Photo: Coco Olakunle/FX
This listlessness can be exhausting, especially for people of color who have Get It. However, Atlanta’s mindset is increasingly one of exhaustion — most of her stories wrestle with the white gaze implicitly, and the joys of the series lie in the way a given episode might rub audiences’ faces in their mockery of that gaze without going so far they say outright that’s what it does. After all, it’s just a show about rappers.
Perhaps that’s why Three Slaps begins the way it begins: with a prologue of two men in a boat at night discussing the haunted history of the lake they are in. One is white, the other black, and the Unnamed White Man tells a story reminiscent of the real Lake Lanier, an artificial lake in Georgia where death is an unsettling regularity. The man’s account ties Lanier’s real-world status as a moat to a shared urban legend: Lanier was once the site of a city ruled and populated by blacks, and flooded in retaliation by angry whites.
“Anyone can be white with enough blood and money,” the man concludes. “It has always been like this.”
Welcome to the fun house. Do you know how long you’ve been here?
Atlanta Season 3 currently airs Thursdays on FX, with new episodes streaming the next day on Hulu.