“Atlanta,” which will air its final episode Nov. 10 on FX, is going out as a deeply strong and well-made show. And if it no longer quite feels like the major one it did in its early going, that suits it well, too.
This observation deserves clarifying, because I don’t mean to slight the work of series lead and driving creative force Donald Glover, or collaborators including frequent director Hiro Murai. But in the time since “Atlanta” first aired in 2016 — and, crucially, the years of its extended hiatus, from when it left the air in 2018 to its return earlier this year — the ground shifted around it. In its first two seasons, “Atlanta” looked like nothing else on television. That’s less true now. And the show’s return, with two new seasons both airing in 2022, felt muted in part because of its outlandish creativity: Its pointillistic portrait of the world of Earn, Glover’s character, could, at times, give us little onto which to grasp. Some of the show’s stand-alone episodes are genuinely thrilling television. But it can be hard to know, from the present vantage point, how the show will be remembered as a whole.
From the first, “Atlanta” merges a strong, crisp visual aesthetic with a loopy, anything-is-possible creative sensibility; it features an overarching plot momentum with installments that look hard at minor details of the story, or elements one might not have even expected to be in the story at all. Consider “B.A.N.,” a Season 1 episode told as a half-hour of programming on a fictionalized news network, or “Teddy Perkins,” the second season’s depiction of a fame-warped monster for whom one feels both fear and pain. These existed outside Earn’s direct line of sight, but they contributed to a sense of his Atlanta, a booming and multifarious city at the center of America’s culture industry, as one of both possibility and oddity, where the potential for tragedy or sudden violence or an expression of pain hung intriguingly in the air.
This, too, describes “Barry,” which launched on HBO in 2018, and, to an extent, FX’s “Reservation Dogs,” which began in 2021. Both feel indebted to “Atlanta.” But “Atlanta” stands out for its eagerness not merely to be absurd but to be purposefully random. The show’s third season changing its setting to Europe generated some truly interesting cross-cultural comedy and new dynamics for characters. It also meant that, after four years off the air, the show had become about a different set of conditions, ones about which it had somewhat less to say. I raved about the Season 3 premiere, “Three Slaps,” a startling depiction of racialized abuse within the foster-care system that plays out with the logic of a nightmare; its place within the larger story of “Atlanta,” though, is somewhat unclear to me.
Maybe “Atlanta” was most itself when acting as a sort of anthology series, drawing upon the collective bad dreams endured by Black Americans in the 21st century and spinning them in endless new directions. But that also means that it’s a show that can lack a center. The third-to-last episode returning to the B.A.N. network for a faux-documentary about the production of “A Goofy Movie” was a characteristic big swing, and, equally characteristically, used its offbeat subject matter to tell a story of surprising power. But its place in the season hit pause on what had, finally, been some forward momentum in the story of Earn and Van (Zazie Beetz). And it was not the first time the show returned to a well it had visited before, to diminishing returns: This season’s depiction of the Tyler Perry-esque entertainment industry titan Mr. Chocolate felt in moments like a retread of Teddy Perkins, a celebrity demon for whom entitlement is a way of life.
To love “Atlanta” was, at times, to be frustrated by it — and to love it, increasingly, was to miss it even as it hadn’t yet ended. That was true in the years of its hiatus, as more story lay ahead, and it was true throughout 2022, as its place in the culture seemed to have downshifted. “Atlanta,” at its peak of popularity, sat at the center of the conversation about television, and looked good there. It’s a credit to Glover’s and his whole team’s creative integrity that they consistently made choices that pushed it further into the left lane.
Critiquing its various decisions ultimately feels beyond the point: While we in the audience can’t exactly know, “Atlanta” seems more than most series precisely like the thing its creators wanted to make, both in its virtuosity and its moments of overreach. Its zigs and zags, its discursive ramblings and its journeys away from the character who ought to hold our attention had the jaggedness of human thought. Even as it frustrated me, “Atlanta” showed a new way for this art form to look and feel. And if that achievement ends up being an ancillary anecdote when the history of this moment in television is ultimately written, well, “Atlanta” excelled at stand-alone stories.
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November 08, 2022 at 04:15AM
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Why ‘Atlanta’ Was a Frustrating, Genius Work of TV Art - Variety
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