Talk about losing momentum. It’s been three years since FX’s critically-acclaimed “Atlanta” show aired, and if the long-awaited and overdue season three doesn’t air by March 2022, it’ll have been four years in-between seasons. Some of that was due to taking time off— the careers of the entire cast, Donald Glover, Brian Tyree Henry, Lakeith Stanfield, and Zazie Beetz, were seriously taking off—and some of that was delayed because of the pandemic that has spanned for nearly two years and delayed everything. Despite all that, Glover released a Halloween-night teaser for “Atlanta” season three last night.
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Unveiled on a site named Gilga.com last night by Glover on Twitter, but since taken down (though preserved by keen-eyed YouTubers, see below), the surreal, nightmarish clip uses Sun Ra’s eerie and funereal “It’s After The End of the World,” and takes a tour through a seemingly dilapidated haunted house.
Eventually, the teaser zeroes in on Brian Tyree Henry’s Alfred “Paper Boi” Miles character, the rapper of the show. Sitting at a grand dining table while wearing a sweater that says “fake” on it, the rapper looks disturbed and concerned, possibly about what’s to come. Noticeably, two of the servants behind Henry are white, and the entire thing does have a Jordan Peele-like creepy vibe to it; hence it being released on Halloween.
The cryptic clip ends after that (aside from teasing a vague 2022 release), perhaps a sign that “Atlanta,” already getting stranger and more bizarre as time went on, will continue on with the dark magical realism it was displaying in season two. Glover had always pitched his ideal version of the show—about a struggling Atlanta rapper, his cousin and music manager and friend, trying to break through in the music scene—as “’Twin Peaks’ with rappers,” and perhaps the show is finally pushing that concept to its fullest.
Not much is known about the upcoming episodes, but “Atlanta” seasons three and four were both written together and shot back-to-back. The two seasons were initially scheduled for a 2021 release but were then delayed by the pandemic. One season, presumably three, is set in Atlanta, while the other takes place in Europe, and that’s about all the details we have
“I align the seasons, I think, to me, like Kanye records,” Glover said in 2018. “I feel like this is our ‘Graduation.’ This is probably our most accessible but also the realest — an honest version of it — and I feel like the most enjoyable, like the third album. We were all on iMessage together and kind of talking about it, and I think people were really hungry to like beat ourselves, which is great.”
Watch the trailer, which was uploaded to YouTube via Gilga.com, below.