When the promotional posters for Donald Glover’s Atlanta first started appearing online at some point early in 2016, they pictured its main characters (sans Zazie Beetz’s Van) — Princeton dropout turned aspiring music manager Earn (Glover), his newly-famous rapper cousin Alfred (Brian Tyree Henry), and idiosyncratic maverick Darius (LaKeith Stanfield) — sitting on and jumping over a pale orange couch (not coincidentally, you suspect, akin to the one that resides in Central Perk) in the middle of a sun-drenched field with blue, almost cloudless skies behind them. Here, the couch feels as essential as the guys, an allusion to the iconography of the sitcom. Like any cosy enough apartment, coffee shop, or diner, it looked as though it would come to function as a familiar, reassuring base for the characters to continuously return to. There’ll be problems, but here, we might assume, the gang will converge, unburden themselves, and sift through them together. Tonally, this is the kind of thing FX executives originally thought they were green-lighting with Glover’s new show. Per The New Yorker, according to his brother Stephen, when pitching Atlanta, Donald promised that “Earn and Al work together to make it in the rough music industry. Al got famous for shooting someone and now he’s trying to deal with fame, and I’ll have a new song for him every week. Darius will be the funny one, and the gang’s going to be all together.”
“That,” Stephen would later say, “was the Trojan horse.”
Atlanta isn’t, and was never really going to be, anything like a sitcom. It deviates wildly from Glover’s pitch (according to the Glover brothers, the network only fully embraced its slow, avant-garde pilot after it tested well), and the couch and all it potentially represented is absent for most of both seasons (its brief appearances bookend the first season and then it doesn’t appear again until the final episode of season two). Its absence, however, feels emblematic of Atlanta’s aesthetic. Atlanta’s world is one that lacks a centre, a world in which nothing really feels familiar or reassuring, a world in which there is little to cling to in a maelstrom of absurdity. Its main characters do come together plenty — especially Earn, Alfred, and Darius — but they are more often than not cut adrift, sometimes for entire episodes at a time (in season two, four of its 11 episodes are each dedicated to one character, none focusing on Earn, Atlanta’s ostensible protagonist), working out their issues alone as they try, and usually fail, to process and push back against a surreal, indifferent world and their place within it.
From its team of close-knit writers (Donald and Stephen Glover, Stefani Robinson, Jamal Olori, Taofik Kolade, and Ibra Ake) to long-time Glover collaborator Hiro Murai’s detached, minimalist direction, to its impeccable casting, even in its minor roles (see Kat Williams as the eponymous “Alligator Man,” Rick Holmes as the nauseatingly radical-chic Craig, and YouTuber Niles Stewart as Antoine, the trans-racial Black teenager who identifies as a 35-year-old white man named Harrison), Atlanta is a triumph of collaborative effort. Yet ultimately, unlike a lot of TV — and contemporary film, for that matter — it’s a show that still feels distinctly auteurist. It remains, above all else, a product of its creator’s inimitable sensibility and singular vision. In short, it has Glover all over it. Which is to say that Atlanta is as enigmatic, slippery, and infuriatingly paradoxical as Glover himself.
“I care about what people think… it’s always important to care what other people think,” Glover says in 2013, sitting cross-legged on The Arsenio Hall Show couch in a thin, raggedy t-shirt, Bermuda shorts, and a pair of boat shoes, responding to Hall quoting from one of a series of now infamous notes that he scrawled onto a Residence Inn’s hotel paper and posted onto his Instagram. These notes, mainly taking the form of seemingly spontaneous, confessional lists, read like emotional ejaculation, discharged onto the paper in a cathartic release of his pent-up fears and anxieties.
I’M AFRAID PEOPLE HATE WHO I REALLY AM. I’M AFRAID OF THE FUTURE. I’M AFRAID PEOPLE THINK I HATE MY RACE. I’M AFRAID PEOPLE THINK I HATE WOMEN. I’M SCARED I’LL NEVER GROW OUT OF BRO RAPE. I’M AFRAID THIS IS ALL AN ACCIDENT. I’M SCARED I NEVER KNEW ANYTHING. I’M SCARED PEOPLE WILL FIND OUT WHAT I MASTURBATE TO. I FEEL THAT THIS WILL FEEL PRETENTIOUS. I’M AFRAID I’LL REGRET THIS.
“I want to do the best thing I can,” he goes on to tell Hall, “but sometimes it’s like, you know, I’m insecure, I feel weird about a bunch of stuff.” Here, like in those notes, like in his appearance on The Breakfast Club, like in his Hot 97 interview, and even in his freestyle over Drake’s “Pound Cake” on Sway in the Morning, where he slips seamlessly from rapping into a conversation with Sway about the power of money and honesty then back into the freestyle again, Glover is almost certainly being genuine, wanting to be open, vulnerable, and connected.
Fast forward to five years later. In a profile with The New Yorker’s Tad Friend in 2018, his career burgeoning as he comes off the back of his third studio album Awaken My Love (its lead single “Redbone” would ultimately go triple platinum) with appearances in Solo: A Star Wars Story, Spiderman: Homecoming, and the live-action adaptation of The Lion King on the horizon, Glover all but admits that he fabricated some of the various stories and anecdotes he had told to unwitting hosts and audiences over the last few years, all in order to avoid actually talking about himself. To Jimmy Fallon, he had told a story about being bitten on the ass by a dog named Barry. James Corden lapped up his story about a chance encounter with a seal that popped up next to his surfboard, and he joked with Conan O’Brien about having a stand-off in Big Sur with a sexy coyote (“This really happened,” he promised at the time). The same Glover who had seemed so open and candid on Hall’s show was now taking the essence of the funny animal video, of YouTube and Vine and now TikTok culture, and turning it into a tool for deflection, at the same time quietly mocking our collective appetite for innocuous whimsy. “Your job,” he tells Friend when questioned on his appearances on said talk shows, “is to be as interesting as possible without actually saying anything.”
It can be unnerving to watch Glover in interviews, and in public appearances in general, with this knowledge as the undercurrent to what’s playing out in front of you, making it much harder to discern his genuine interactions from his performed ones. Publicly, at least, he is offbeat but still affable, endlessly charming and effortlessly witty — the sort of character traits that, coupled with immense talent, tend to have their own gravitational pull — yet, as Friend writes, “…none of that is exactly right, or exactly right for long.” Indeed, for the most part, the Donald Glover of the New Yorker piece comes off as cold and broody, somewhat nihilistic and somewhat lonely, a man inundated with thoughts and ideas but with barely anybody he can really relate to.
To watch Atlanta, then, is to feel, as anyone with this knowledge might do when watching Glover, that you’re never on solid ground. It is at once hypnotic and dizzying, funny and frightening, tender and caustic. And above all else, it’s just plain weird. It is therefore natural that when first watching it you have to attune to its rhythms, to its almost alienating strangeness, sensing all the while that if you don’t it will leave you behind without looking back. And you’d be right because, despite what Glover said about himself back in 2013, his show clearly doesn’t care what you think about it anyway.
If, as Bret Easton Ellis and Quentin Tarantino concurred in a 2015 interview in The New York Times, “TV relies on a kind of relentless storytelling whose main job is to constantly dispense information, while movies depend much more on mood and atmosphere” (smaller budgets in TV tend to mean less spectacle, less spectacle means more emphasis on script and dialogue and keeping the story in motion), then part of what makes Atlanta feel so unique, so singular amongst everything else currently on TV, is that it has, from its first episode, seemed increasingly indifferent to the demands of its format. Unlike most TV, Atlanta often deliberately withholds information only to never fully explain itself, rarely offering the moments where storylines and pieces of information coalesce into catharsis, into pay-off. Instead, Atlanta lingers, almost to the point of self-indulgence, it’s lush cinematography and irresistible direction encouraging you to marinate in its world, in its atmosphere. And it is into this atmosphere, this outré aesthetic, that it folds its ideology.
The two main components that make up this atmosphere, then, insofar as it can be pinned down, are a languorous, hazy, hallucinatory quality that seeps into everything like smoke in a hotboxed car, and a latent sense of threat, an itchy feeling of unease and uncanniness, that constantly hums beneath the surface of every scene. It is a tension that permeates almost every minute spent in Atlanta’s world, a tension that sometimes erupts and sometimes doesn’t, but one which infuses everything with the sense that something is almost always off.
In the episode “The Jacket,” as Earn, Al, and Darius are innocently waiting for an Uber driver who has promised to return Earn’s lost bomber jacket, there is a moment when it feels like the air tightens, when an inexplicably (but, as it turns out, rightfully) paranoid Al senses that something isn’t right. And when the police burst into the scene, swarming around Al’s car the moment he tries to drive off, there is that all-too-familiar feeling that one or all of them is going to end up in handcuffs or a body bag, that none of them are safe. Ultimately, no harm befalls any of them, but they watch on as the aforementioned Uber driver is shot and killed in front of, we assume, a keening relative or spouse. In “Sportin’ Waves,” there is a tension that emanates from the overwhelmingly white offices of a Spotify-type music platform that Earn and Al visit in order to extend the latter’s reach. Nothing really happens, but the incongruity of the company’s sterilised open-plan office culture (Al and Earn are assured everything in the staff kitchen is both organic and gluten-free) to the reality of Al’s life and the sense of necessity his music comes from (“I scare people at ATMs. I have to rap. That’s what rap is, making the best out of a bad situation,” Al tells a parasitic wannabe influencer in “The Streisand Effect”) is as disquieting as it is funny. In “Alligator Man,” with the police at the front door of Earn’s uncle’s house, a golden handgun stashed under said uncle’s bed, and a literal Cayman cooped up in a spare room, Darius has to excuse himself because the vibe is “starting to feel more and more like jail.” And in “Juneteenth,” at a party hosted by Van’s friend Monique and her affluent white husband Craig, there is a tension that comes from a cloying, bourgeois white liberalness that is so ridiculous (Craig’s Jim Crow-themed slam poetry performance is equal parts delicious and nauseating, the stunning apotheosis of a familiar blend of white guilt and condescension) that it becomes unbearably eerie. “It doesn’t feel like you’re in a Spike Lee-directed Eyes Wide Shut right now?” an unnerved Earn asks Van.
Even at its funniest and most playful, there is real menace shot through Atlanta that can never be shaken off, a sense that its characters are almost always perilously close to the edge. And it is in the contribution to this feeling that all these seemingly absurd parts find cohesion, with each moment, no matter how bizarre or unhinged, amounting to — as Glover has said — the articulation of something ineffable: “The thesis with this show was to show people what it’s like to be Black, and you can’t write that down. You have to feel it. I want people to feel scared, because that’s what it feels like to be Black.”
In “Champagne Papi,” one of the weirder episodes in Atlanta’s significantly darker, significantly more experimental second season — subtitled “Robbin’ Season,” a nod to the time period in Atlanta just before Christmas when increased desperation leads to a surge in robberies around the city — we find Van and her friends on their way to a New Year’s Eve party being held at a mansion in some undisclosed location outside the city. Van, realising that Earn is moving on and seeing other women after she put an end to their on-off relationship in “Helen,” is intent on getting an Instagram-enhancing photo with Drake, the supposed, Gatsby-esque host of said party (everyone seems to know him through someone else in his vaguely immediate orbit, be it his tour barber, his chef, or his nutritionist, but as the night goes on it becomes increasingly difficult to actually meet him). After fruitlessly searching, and eventually getting lost in, the mansion, the night ends with Van finding out that Drake is in Europe on tour and was never actually at the party to begin with. The pictures of him alongside some of the partygoers that she has seen circulating Instagram have been taken alongside various life-size Drake cut-outs in one of the mansion’s myriad rooms, at the expense of $20 ($30 if you want a pair of free Puma slides included).
The mansion — labyrinthine, surreal, and filled with as many dead ends as possibilities (or at least signifiers of possibilities) — is Atlanta’s world in microcosm. In it, nothing ever feels reliable enough to be trusted, and often what seems to be a real possibility turns out to be a mirage that dissolves or changes form the minute the characters reach out to grasp it. Like the genuine connection you thought you made with a girl at the club that expires as soon as the lights come up. “Wasting your time? We had a good time, right? That’s why you came here? To party with cute girls like me and have a good time? We did that,” said girl tells Al before disappearing into the night, taking her phone number with her. Or like the opportunity to perform at a college campus, and thus build a college fanbase, that lands you in the living room of a frat house, sitting in front of a couch-length Confederate flag, as a group of naked pledges dance silently to D4L’s “Laffy Taffy.” Or the once-in-a-lifetime chance to acquire a rainbow-keyed piano that leaves you shackled to a chair with a deranged Michael Jackson reincarnation pointing a shotgun at your chest. In Atlanta the line between the real and the surreal is always blurred, and its absurd world is constantly shifting beneath its characters’ feet, meaning that they’re forever working against the odds to figure out how to manipulate it — to avoid being manipulated by it.
Yet, despite all this, Atlanta still somehow manages to drift imperceptibly between dream logic and instances of sobering, hard reality, its tone all the while remaining coherent. In “The Streisand Effect,” Darius leads Earn on a circuitous quest to turn a profit off of an old phone that sees the two acquire a samurai sword in a pawn shop which is subsequently traded for a Cane Corso in the back of a seedy, gang-occupied warehouse before being passed on to a breeder somewhere out in the sticks. The episode ends with an exasperated Earn berating Darius Earn won’t see a return on his investment until September — for losing the money he needed to stay afloat: “I’m poor, Darius. Poor people don’t have time for investments. They’re too busy trying not to be poor. I need to eat today, not in September.” There’s a similar sentiment expressed in “Juneteenth” when Craig, discussing his own self-described “pilgrimage” to Africa (“to ask for forgiveness”), expresses his disappointment in Earn for having never made the trip himself: “You’ve gotta go! Man, it’s your motherland! What are you thinking?” Later, after the tension finally reaches a boiling point, Earn will finally snap as he and Van leave the party, telling Craig that he’s not going back to Africa to discover his roots because he’s “fucking broke.” In both instances, Earn encapsulates what it is to be poor and Black in a country steeped in the mythology of equal opportunity and independence, to play the game as though the playing field is invariably level. The reality at the heart of Atlanta’s surrealism is that its characters are trying to survive and stay sane, day to day, paycheck to paycheck. Outside of that there isn’t always time for much else in the way of self-actualisation.
In “Robbin’ Season,” Atlanta does a lot of expanding upon the motifs established in its first season, but it’s in its final episode, “Crabs in a Barrel” — the final episode of Atlanta before the show’s four-year hiatus as well as its halfway point — where they come to a head. Almost completely devoid of anything surreal or madcap, this is probably Atlanta’s most straightforward episode and one of its most sincere.
Earn, Al, and Darius are heading to Europe on tour with Clark County (a mainstream, fairly anodyne corporate rapper who befriends the guys early on in season two) and Earn is scrambling to ensure they pack everything up and catch their flight on time. Still bearing the bruises of his fight with Al’s friend Tracy in “North of the Border,” Earn spends the majority of the episode looking beaten, literally and figuratively, worrying about whether or not Al is going to fire him and replace him with Clark County’s more competent, better connected, white manager and about making enough money to be able to put his daughter through a private school that will prevent her from having her education stymied by the state school’s lack of resources. Here, we’re almost back where we started in Atlanta’s first episode. For all his endeavour, we’re again watching the bottom fall out of Earn’s life.
It’s a devastating moment, then, when Earn, having held it together long enough to get everyone to the airport on time, realises he has forgotten to get rid of the golden gun that was forced on him by his uncle back in the first episode of “Robbin’ Season.” He knows, and we know, that if he fails, which is what the gun in his backpack all but guarantees, then his daughter suffers as well. She, too, loses irrecoverable ground in the race to get out of the barrel. But he doesn’t, for now at least, and the gun is surreptitiously shoved into Clark County’s bag out of view (Clark will notice the gun and in turn plant it on his own manager, finally eroding the last bit of trust Earn and Alfred might have had in him). In spite of all the odds that have been stacked against him, Earn wins, regardless of who got fucked over in the process and regardless of how transient this win might be.
But what Earn’s win concretises is that, in Atlanta’s world, a world in which most of its inhabitants are disenfranchised and desperately searching for a way out of their circumstances, life is a zero-sum game — eat or be eaten. It’s something that Al understands, something that he’s probably understood a lot longer than Earn, and he makes it clear that he respects him for finally showing a necessary, if somewhat immoral, ruthless streak. Both are complicit, not because they’re bad people or because they want other people to suffer, but because, as Al says to Earn on the plane, they, like everyone else around them, have no choice but to survive. Because there’s little room for morality in a system that keeps you with your back permanently against the wall.
It’s a moment earlier in “Crabs in a Barrel”, however, that best articulates the odds the characters are up against on a daily basis. At a passport renewal office (Darius has waited until the day of the flight to let Earn know his passport has expired), the young, Jewish receptionist intuits that Earn is a rapper’s manager and recommends his cousin as an entertainment lawyer (his cousin, he tells Earn when asked, got into the business via his father). Earn, still hung up on Al’s insistence that they hire a “high-level Jewish dude,” asks if he honestly thinks there is a Black entertainment lawyer as good as his cousin. “There definitely is —” the receptionist hesitates, before admitting “ — but part of being good at your job are your connections, and Black people just don’t have the connections that my cousin has. For…systemic reasons.” It’s a jarring moment of candour and we never really know how Earn processes it. But it reflects his own position back to him, as someone lacking connections, someone out of his depth, starting from scratch without a safety net and without any unearned advantages. This, Atlanta wants us to understand, is part of what it means to be poor and Black, to try to exist within structures that are inherently and pervasively stacked against you, to be swimming against the tide from the outset.
It is this motif of moving forward against the current, against the momentum of the characters’ circumstances, of their lives and what they have been made up of thus far, that is a through line amidst Atlanta’s bizarre, disorientating unreality. In Atlanta’s first episode, a bewildering bow-tied stranger on the bus (later revealed to be Ahmad White, the face of a dubious spiritual guidance hotline) advises Earn — after he confides, “I just keep losing” — to move beyond seeing life as a series of wins and losses, to instead “let the path push you like a broken branch in the river’s current,” to which he responds: “Nah, nah. I’m not going out like that.” It’s a stance Earn reaffirms in the first episode of season 2, snapping at his uncle: “What I’m scared of is being you. Someone everyone knew was smart but ended up being a know-it-all fuck-up jay that just let shit happen to him.” This is, up until now at least, Atlanta’s central tension. Its characters can either accept the cards that life has dealt them or push back against the momentum of an almost endless line of seemingly inexorable causalities, be they in their control or not, that make up such a large part of who they are, what they do, and where they will end up. It asks to what extent the latter is really possible, how many of us will ever manage it, and how many of us are ever really in a position to.
It’s a gaping black hole of a question, and Atlanta doesn’t pretend to have an answer — it isn’t in the business of answering questions, only posing more. But for all of its, and Glover’s, opaqueness, mordancy, and nihilism, in the final moments of season two, with Earn pushing back and winning, albeit by the skin of his teeth, it offers a glimmer of hope heading into its penultimate season. But it’s still Glover-brand hope, and we know better than to completely trust it.
