The second season of Atlanta might be the best TV I see all year. It’s hard to imagine what would top it.
It’s exactly the sort of thing TV is great at but that the medium does too rarely. It feels bigger than itself, with every episode spinning off into new tangents and chasing down additional rabbit trails. Atlanta rarely plays by the rules of the clockwork plot, where everything fits into an exact place and half the fun is in seeing how all the pieces mesh. Even when the show introduces a very literal Chekhov’s gun, in the form of a gold-plated firearm that protagonist Earn (played by creator Donald Glover) is tasked with hiding in the season two premiere, the way the gun “goes off” is stranger and more muted than you’d expect.
Stories in Atlanta are tied together less by plot or even character than mood. It’s a show about how the world, as seen through the eyes of Earn and his friends, is haunted by the ghosts of other selves.
In the finale, Earn asks a Jewish man, who’s suggested that his cousin could be the perfect entertainment lawyer for Earn’s cousin, Alfred (Brian Tyree Henry), the up-and-coming rapper Paper Boi, if there’s any way a black lawyer could be as good of a lawyer as the other man’s cousin. The Jewish man says, sure, but being a lawyer inevitably requires connections — and black people rarely have the same level of connections for “systemic reasons.” He’s trying to be polite, but his response is a reminder to Earn (who is working as Alfred’s manager, another job requiring connections) of all that holds him in place even when his career seems to move forward.
Atlanta, then, is about the intricacies of identity. Yes, it’s Glover’s attempt to create a series that underlines the black experience in modern America, but it’s also about attempts to transcend one’s own identity, to figure out what it means to be an individual in a world intent on quickly pigeonholing everyone.
The second season is obsessed with differences between “fake” and “real,” from $100 bills Earn tries to use that are assumed to be counterfeit because he’s black to the idea of our reality being a mere simulation in some other universe, all of us video game characters. Authenticity is considered necessary to individualism, but Glover is fascinated by how difficult achieving authenticity even is for his characters.
And yet Atlanta is a comedy — and a frequently hilarious one at that. How is it able to encompass so much, in running times that never feel padded, while still being able to shift tones on a dime, when so many other TV shows in its “not quite comedy, but not quite drama” space struggle to do so? It’s all due to its rock-solid sitcom construction.
Every episode of Atlanta starts from a sitcom premise, then goes somewhere far more thoughtful
It’s easy to forget now that he’s taken over the world, but Donald Glover cut his teeth working as a writer on 30 Rock before moving on to a major supporting role on Community, whose creator, Dan Harmon, has stated that Glover’s improvised jokes were ones that often made it to final cut. Glover, as you might expect from that résumé, is one of the best pure joke writers on the planet, able to take just about any line and find exactly the right spin to make it as funny as possible.
But that time working in the network sitcom trenches gave him something in addition to joke-writing prowess. It gave him an innate understanding of sitcom storytelling structure and how to use that to guide the audience through an episode of television. Indeed, every single episode of Atlanta starts from the sort of time-honored sitcom premise that wouldn’t feel out of home on I Love Lucy: Earn comes into a windfall and tries to take his girlfriend out, only to have the night ruined; Alfred’s friend Darius (Lakeith Stanfield) tries to reason with a stranger whose ideas about the world mark him as an oddball recluse; Alfred gets roped into the schemes of a local businessman.
This, incidentally, is similar to how 30 Rock structured episodes, starting from very old sitcom premises, then increasing the pacing and cramming them full of jokes until they no longer resembled themselves. But where 30 Rock sped up, Atlanta slows way down. It follows the basic beats of the story you’d expect, but it stretches them out, leaving room for flights of surreal fancy, for weirdness, for outright horror.
Take the second season’s most celebrated episode, the Darius-centric short horror tale “Teddy Perkins.” In the episode, Darius finds himself trapped in the mansion of the strange, reclusive titular character, a black man who claims both he and his mysterious brother suffer from an unusual skin condition that has turned their skin white. Darius just wants to purchase a cool piano Teddy owns, but Teddy has more murderous desires.
It’s not hard to see where this could have easily become, say, an episode of Frasier, with Frasier and Niles trying to deal with someone very odd in order to obtain some item they desperately wanted, all the while wondering if the “brother” really existed or was a put-on by their captor. And the story follows the beats of that story, more or less — Darius puts up with Teddy’s shenanigans so long as they’re mostly harmless, and there’s confusion about the existence of the brother, and so on. The episode even ends with Darius not getting the piano in the end, the kind of winking, status quo-burnishing conclusion that American sitcoms have always favored.
But the experience of watching “Teddy Perkins” is nothing like the above. It’s at once a horror story and a sad rumination on the struggles of children with abusive parents, who long for an artistic greatness they can only find through their kids. Darius doesn’t escape the situation with a funny story, as Frasier and Niles might have; he’s lucky to escape with his life. And his confusion over which of the Perkins brothers is “real” both mirrors the season’s larger thematic concerns and plays into Glover’s interest in artistic authenticity. Even the obligatory scene where Darius calls Alfred to ask for advice is more philosophical than wacky, with Darius explaining how he lives his life trying to minimize regret.
On the one hand, this sitcom construction allows Atlanta to constantly pivot among tones. It can be screamingly funny in one moment, then immediately become sad or scary or angry. It also allows the series to imbue worn-out sitcom storylines — like, say, Earn and his ex-girlfriend Van (Zazie Beetz) contemplating enrolling their daughter in an exclusive private school — with richer stakes than other shows might be able to. It’s also why the show is able to pull off more obvious punchline-style jokes than many other experimental comedies in its vein. It’s a lot harder to pull off a one-liner on something like Transparent or Girls.
But most of all, the construction of the show suggests that the crazy fun of a sitcom storyline is its own form of white privilege. Simply by virtue of the color of their skin, Earn and his friends can’t occupy a Frasier episode. The world won’t allow them to. The story of “Teddy Perkins” might be a funny one on some level, but for Darius, it can only ever leave scars.
The second season of Atlanta is available to stream on FX’s streaming services.