What’s the best way to describe Atlanta?
The FX comedy, which aired its season finale last night, is so funny, and absurd, and bizarre, and otherworldly, and strange. The word that keeps surfacing is surreal. But it is also among the most naturalistic series on the air, filmed in a way that captures the slow, sticky humidity of its titular city, scattering gun violence throughout its stories, and refusing to lift our main guy, Earn (creator and writer Donald Glover) out of his dire financial straits.
When we meet Earn, he is both cash-poor and house-poor. The college dropout is crashing with the mother of his daughter and sometime-girlfriend, Van (Zazie Beetz), while trying to scrape money together. Even as he starts managing his cousin, rising rapper Paper Boi (Brian Tyree Henry), he struggles to get by, and those struggles can be degrading and cringe-worthy to watch. Van’s are, too. In one desperate attempt to pass a drug test and keep her job, Van makes like a mad scientist and tries to extricate clean urine out of her daughter’s dirty diapers, only to have this hard-won pee — which she smuggles into the bathroom in a knotted condom taped to her inner thigh — burst all over her clothes.
This is not a “how the hell do a bunch of lazy creatives in LA afford that apartment?” show. This is a “our protagonist, who is managing an up-and-coming rapper, is literally homeless and ends the first season living inside a storage unit” show. While the Silver Lake screw-ups of You’re the Worst seem to have bottomless bank accounts with which to fund their bottomless brunches, Earn can’t swing dinner and dessert when he tries to take Van on a date.
But with that realism as a baseline, Atlanta often veers off into these riffs that have a dream-logic quality about them. A night at a club ends with a few parking lot stragglers getting mowed over by an invisible car. A black Justin Bieber is introduced without explanation. An entire episode of the show is presented as an episode of a fake talk show, Montague, which profiles a Rachel Dolezal-style black guy who believes he’s really white, complete with fake commercials:
Around the season premiere, Glover told The Daily Beast that he was most proud of how, with Atlanta, “we got away with being honest. The things that people are most attracted to online are the things that are the realest, the most honest. We tried to do that on the show because I feel like that’s a part of being black that people don’t see. I’m trying to make people feel black.”
With that mission statement in mind, Glover has built a show that is nuanced and insightful about race in ways that are unexpected, striking, and darkly comic. It’s hard to imagine any other series including a character like spacey philosopher Darius (Keith Stanfield), who takes a dog-shaped target to a shooting range and gets kicked out; the white men at the range, aiming their rifles at black, human silhouettes, find Darius’ choice of target too appalling to stomach. It is impossible to think of a series that could pull off an episode like the hilarious, bananas “Juneteenth,” in which Van and Earn attend a extremely immersive theme party hosted by an interracial couple, the white male half of which entertains his guests with a work of slam poetry that includes the lines, “Jim Crow! / Has the name of a man, but / is a ghost. / I am a man! / But Jim Crow is haunting me, / like in that movie Poltergeist.”
Atlanta doesn’t feel like anything else on television. It doesn’t really feel like anything else, period, although it does have a bit of a This is How You Lose Her quality to it: The episodes aren’t 100 percent linear, but everything is connected; some of Earn‘s encounters and experiences seem to take place beyond the bounds of reality, but his world still feels real; the propellent is not a “what happens next?” plot, but the series is still stacked with story. Atlanta has the zany, non-sequitur-now-back-to-business quality of a sitcom like 30 Rock (for which Glover used to write) but the cinematography of a Breaking Bad-type prestige drama. (Hiro Murai, best known for his music videos, directed seven of the season’s ten episodes.)
Maybe the thing at the center of Atlanta that makes the show so good was best summed up by Stephen Glover, Donald’s brother and a writer on the show, during an interview with Vulture about “Nobody Beats the Biebs” back in September. In explaining the thinking behind the parody, Glover said they quickly abandoned the initial plan to cast a “light-skinned guy with blonde hair.” They were partly driven by the desire to upend the fact that “no black kid’s ever gonna get the job to portray Justin Bieber.”
“This is something we’re never gonna get to see,” he said. “Unless we do it ourselves.”