If you're white, you might remember that black, nerdy kid from the show Community who seemed funny named Donald Glover. If you're a movie-buff you've seen him pop up in The Martian, Spider-Man Homecoming, or The Lazarus Effect. If you're a nerd you know he's playing Lando in the new Star Wars movie. If you're trendy this last week you just saw his music video "This is America" all over the news (and if you're really cool, you already knew about him under his musical stage-name Childish Gambino years ago). He also won awards as a writer on 30 Rock (yeah, that one, where Tina Fey hired him). He also has stand-up comedy on Netflix. But if you're black, you know him from Atlanta, his slick new indie-style TV show he stars in, writes, produces and sometimes even directs on FX about a couple guys in Atlanta coming up in the rap music scene and the real-life troubles and obstacles they encounter both staying around their neighborhood and trying to break out of it. But Atlanta is too good not to share with larger mainstream audiences, and as I discovered after binging both seasons in the last week, it may be about black people, but it's not just for them. Everyone should be watching it. I don't even know where to start. I've never reviewed an entire series before. So far it's just two seasons but with critical acclaim, good ratings, plenty of award nominations and wins and Donald Glover's growing name recognition, it's clearly just getting started. Donald Glover plays Earn, an intelligent but weather-worn Princeton dropout who is perpetually broke and technically homeless but whose cousin Al is about to hit it big (relatively speaking) as a local rap artist with his new underground hit song Paper Boi. Earn sees an opportunity to ride the coattails of his not-that-close cousin by attempting to leverage his so-called connections to be his manager. The connections prove vague and rare, if not merely singular: a meager contact at the radio station which barely works in spite of itself, but gets the song on the radio and gets him the gig. Earn also has an on and off relationship with Van, the mother of his daughter, with whom he regularly bickers about choices of career and lifestyle and the logistics of raising a kid on little to no money. Van also happens to be played by Zazie Beets who is about to hit it big in the new Deadpool 2 movie out this weekend. So good for her. If you've seen Aziz Ansari's wickedly goofy and brilliantly nuanced Master of None on Netflix, you'll understand Atlanta on an intuitive level. It's a natural blend of satirical comedy, (often dark and awkward), social awareness, hyper-real relationship drama, and casual down-to-earth dialogue about everyday problems with an overtly artistic and indie-film aesthetic loaded with symbolism and tragedy. Some folks have noted similarities to filmmaker David Lynch (because of the strange non-sequiturs that sometimes occur). Others compare it to Curb Your Enthusiasm, instead, because of its awkwardness (semi-fame in the rap industry as well as the juxtaposition of life in an impoverished black neighborhood with the opulence of more affluent social classes). I personally see a clear connection to HBO's Entourage from a few years back about an up and coming movie star and the life of gradually increasing money and fame (except opposite, since there were never any black people in that show and Atlanta is almost exclusively black. I mean they even cast the role of Justin Bieber with a black actor just to... I don't know why exactly, but I'm sure it means something!). Anyway, Atlanta is equal parts heartbreaking and intensely frightening, but always manages to gives you a wry chuckle and challenge your base assumptions about social behavior. There's two themes I feel describe the core of Atlanta: Desperation and Compromise. Okay, maybe those are just the feelings I infer while watching it. It's actual themes revolve around being black (and broke) in the complex and inconsistent social systems which collectively form America. Around the local neighborhood, Earn's cousin Al gets recognized all over as Paper Boi when he's tired or angry or just not in the mood. People want selfies and handouts and maybe he could check out this mixed tape they've been working on, but they all want him to act like a star, to be "on" for them. He just wants to be "real" but that contradicts success and successful behavior at every turn. One girl scolds him in Season 2 when he declines to waste his time on Instagram like her, baiting for followers, "You've done radio and interviews, you've already been not-real," she reminds him. At the studio, they have to deal with awkward white people pretending to talk and act "black" to be cool but who only want to get in business with the potentially lucrative black rappers. Even hanging around other rappers reveals the artifice and hypocrisy of pop-culture success. One episode sees Earn and Van out of their depth in a traditional German Octoberfest party in which they're basically the only black people. Another has them rubbing elbows at the fancy dinner of an affluent white guy obsessed with African-American culture, complete with trophy black wife, who insists on lecturing them about what they've been through and chastising Earn for not visiting Africa yet. Still another sees them playing a gig on a college campus only to end up in the basement of an all white frat house beneath a Confederate flag smoking weed with dumb hicks who love Paper Boi but with absolutely indiscriminate taste. These scenarios are goofy and ridiculous but highlight what life is like to be one type of culture and have to adapt, conform or play along in the midst of dozens of other cultures which hold more leverage than your own. We know how uncomfortable these situations are not just because of Donald Glover's superior acting, but because of his writing: he shows us what their day to day life is like first when they're laughing, having fun, talking casually and naturally, and then stands them up in stiff clothing with stilted dialogue to dance them through difficult environments they're desperate to get out of. But why are they there? Because they're desperate to begin with. They need to get their daughter into a better school program. They need to hide from people chasing them. They need to get this deal to boost their career. They need this money to pay rent. It's always a need. Paper Boi gets recognized in a back alley by some fans who abruptly turn on him and mug him at gunpoint. Earn secretly lives in a storage unit where his stuff is stored because he can't afford rent. Just getting by is rough and that forces them to make decisions out of desperation because the status quo is not sustainable. That desperation often also leads to compromises. Whenever there is an influx of cash, they are tempted to treat themselves and blow it all too quickly on frivolous vanities and public displays. Or they make immoral decisions to get ahead or protect themselves. As often as not, these moral compromises lead to later consequences that only make their situations more desperate. The Season 2 finale sees Al asking Earn to dispose of a gun for him (which he only got to protect himself after that mugging), which Earn slips into his backpack and forgets about during a hectic day of running errands until they arrive at the airport for an international flight to go on tour in Europe with another rapper. Earn thinks he's about to lose his job to that other rapper's better manager anyway and his relationship with his cousin has become as broken as his relationship with Van who wants to take away their daughter, but he's already at the front of the line for the metal detector when he remembers where that gun is. He's in a desperate situation, so he makes a compromise. He plants the gun in another bag. That other manager takes the fall. And worse (?) his cousin Al saw him do it, but admires it! In a morally convoluted conversation on the plane he tells him, "you're my family, you get me, you know what I come from and what it's like, it's kill or be killed where we're from and I need my manager to do whatever it takes." It may have saved Earn's job as manager, but it casts on ominous cloud over Season 3. I could go on and on about the directing style of Hiro Murai, Glover's long time collaborator on music videos, who brings a level of sophistication to this half-hour cable show that imbues every scene with artistic resonance. I could write a whole blog just about the story structure, which like Master of None that I already mentioned, doesn't conform to traditional serial or episodic limitations but transcends them to produce a variety of genres and styles more akin to a collection of short stories than a TV series. And then there's the race issues which I won't attempt to dive into but which no doubt you can easily find more articulate essays breaking them down across the internet by more qualified writers. Glover taps into a culture and point of view that feels both timeless and preternaturally timely to the issues of our day where he can examine a variety of complex social behaviors with both a critical and comical lens that never comes any closer to preachiness than a furrowed brow or an awkward silence. The acting, the format, the cinematography, the pacing, the writing, the dialogue, the content, the... I can't think of any other metrics by which to measure this show but they are all top notch. Atlanta feels right now like Breaking Bad after its second season but before it blew up on Netflix and became the super-hit we all know it as. In those days Breaking Bad already had all the qualities we know and love, but word of mouth just hadn't carried its accolades far and wide enough to catch up to it. In the time between Season 2 and 3, it had. Perhaps by the time Atlanta returns next year, with Donald Glover riding high off his growing fame in Star Wars, and his increasingly popular music (I'm telling you, you gotta watch "This is America", even if you've already seen it!) it will have the audience waiting for it that it deserves. Atlanta is a smart, funny and socially savvy satire that challenges you to rethink your behavior in public and especially while interacting across the vast and varied cultural milieu that makes up America. Or as they might say in the show itself, Atlanta is some serious woke-ass shit. Real talk. Atlanta is available on FX and Hulu. Sorry.
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