The precarious maneuvering of Black folks through spaces of commerce has punctuated every episode of Donald Glover’s unflinching F.X. dramedy “Atlanta.” After all, the series finds focus in a quartet of characters climbing the hip hop ladder toward stardom. Sometimes their journey intersects with Black entrepreneurs (a shady club owner in “The Club,” a wayward barber in “The Barbershop”). Often their odyssey collides with white folks (a payola D.J. in “The Big Bang,” an upper-class white man anthropologically leering at Black people in “Juneteenth”). The former, typically, provides pure laughs: luxuriating in the eccentric and eclectic fabric of Atlanta’s Black milieu. From the latter arises the series’ uneasiest episodes, wherein whiteness and wealth together, the one often wielding the other, pierces the show’s celebratory mood with surreal shocks of danger. This trend continues in season three.
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“Atlanta” has always taken great pleasure pursuing narrative offramps over obvious plotting. And furthering its indelible entertainment footprint by not crafting episodes that work on every logical level or fit in simple sitcom frames; instead, it’s by taking big swings meant to smash the tv land’s perceived logic, no matter the casualties, to reveal unavoidable truths. These swings rarely overwhelm the writing’s gentle motions or the series’ visual richness and depth and never sacrifice the heartfelt interpersonal dynamics between these characters. Season three’s first four episodes feature ambitious swings fashioned for full-throated laughs and transfixing terrors. But a glaring shortcoming exists.
Season two concluded with Earn (Donald Glover), Al (Brian Tyree Henry), and Darius (Lakeith Stanfield) departing on a European tour, with Van (Zazie Beetz) living at her mother’s house with Lottie, curiously left as an afterthought. With ample time since season two, the showrunners have found a way, albeit forced, to alter that track. In that time, the world has also offered new realities: A virus hadn’t decimated the world, George Floyd was alive, Trump was still in office, and the capital had not been stormed. Music artists are just now touring again. And yet, in reality, much remains the same. Toxic whiteness and racism still pervades, and anti-Black spaces still exist. Season three moves from the series’ familiar home base to Europe’s foreign terrain. The change remaps the series from a nationwide scale, to a worldwide playground. Because anti-Blackness doesn’t just mushroom in America. It’s an international illness.
Still, the premiere standalone episode, “Three Slaps,” which draws on real life sources, picks up in the local confines of Atlanta. It opens to two men, one white and one Black, fishing at night on Lake Lanier. The former shares the story of Oscarville, a self-governed Black town lurking underneath, drowned to make way for a dam. The Black folks living there were so wealthy, they thought of themselves as financially white, and therefore impervious to harm. It’s a tale examining racial boundary crossing and the malleability of whiteness. “Anybody can be white with enough blood and money,” explains the white fisherman. Later, a Black kid named Laquarius (an assured Christopher Farrar) suddenly awakens during class, which suggests the river conversation was his nightmare. A perennial class clown, Laquarius gleefully dances for his white classmates’ delight. The act lands Laquarius in the principal’s office. His hard-nosed mother warns him against being fodder for white people; they’ll betray him in the end. His grandfather lightly slaps the boy’s cheek three times to echo the point, alarming his white guidance counselor to alert child protective services, causing him to be placed with two white lesbian foster parents (played by Jamie Neumann and Laura Dreyfuss).
Director Hiro Murai always finds great enjoyment from exploring the effects of one’s environment, and the importance of one’s kin. Laquarius’ new foster parents, toxic white women who believe themselves woke, already have three Black foster children. Each look with knowing eyes toward Laquarius; non-verbally giving a warning: Don’t trust these white women whose house smells (possibly of home-brewed kombucha, possibly of murderous intent), who avoid using washcloths, and, who put these Black children to work in their organic garden (read small-scale plantation). Splotches of white paint dot the couple’s home, which forcefully seems to spread throughout the episode. Even the unseasoned chicken they serve, devoid of oil, is white. The premiere is a visceral allegory taking cues from the real-life Hart family incident to explain the danger white institutions pose to Black folks: both physically and spiritually.
Because the higher up the ladder Earn, Al, Darius and Van climb, the closer in proximity they are with the surreal dangers of whiteness and wealth. Episode two “Sinterklass is Coming to Town,” interrogates the Netherlands’ Christmas tradition of Black Pete, wherein white participants use Blackface to emulate Santa’s helper. But it’s the white concert promoter, a seemingly eager fan of Paper Boi, carrying danger: The episode’s conclusion, jarring in its charting to its shocking end, reinforces the physical risk toxic whiteness poses to Black people. “The Old Man and the Tree,” the third episode, widens this season’s scope by examining racism in all its forms by placing the quartet at the secret party of a reclusive white billionaire wherein an Asian woman at once practices racial stereotyping and then becomes a target of an equally racist white gang who use allyship as a guise for carrying out bigoted violence. Tellingly, in one critical scene, Earn finds himself staring at a black and white picture of a bank’s founding, catching sight of a Black slave in its background. And the fourth episode, without spoiling anything, is among the series’ best, at once focused on wealth and its lineage to buttressing generational white power.
In this season, “Atlanta” deconstructs the inherent inequality of capitalism — the need for the have and have nots — and how the have nots often end up being Black folks. It’s a tightrope exploration begging for a misstep, even while promising worthwhile ends. In this case, for a show built on characters searching for wealth in a bid for survival, one wonders aloud what subversion the show runners want to take. Is Black capitalism a goal worth striving for when the very definition of capitalism demands that one gathers power through supremacist means? The question gives this season of “Atlanta” an unmistakable and intended friction, a friction whose resolution will come to define the series.
After following these characters for a couple years — from their novice beginnings to taking European tours — it’s nourishing how they’ve grown, yet have never wholly drifted apart. I’m reminded of “B.A.N.,” wherein a lyric from Paper Boi’s song — “If I eff with you, you my N-word, you my N-word for life” — is repeated for laughs. But in a series that proudly veers when others turn, the interpolation of Paper Boi’s words, more than any episode, defines the show’s heart. These characters still find comfort and kinship in each other by mining new emotional truths. The easeful balance struck by the experienced ensemble makes those discoveries feel all the more organic. After failing to land a dream job, Van, for instance, feels adrift and aimless. It’s only natural then that in season three’s first episode she would find the best resolve from Darius, a character who’s always taken great comfort in simply absorbing life. With Earn and Al seemingly secure in their path, where should Van direct her efforts? In their care for each other arises a soulfulness, which rises above the fraught fray of being Black in America, that still feels as fresh and inventive as the day they first graced our television screens.
While every facet of the world has seemed to change or at the very least paused in the four years since season two, “Atlanta” remains unchanged in its drive and introspection, in its gentle graces, in its broad absurdities, its blunt epiphanies, real nightmares and revealing scenarios. It would take a potent, sinister spell for “Atlanta” not to return as itself. In this season, even when the series aims for discomfort, a blatant disregard to be defined except on its own terms makes for a knowing calm. [B+]