Donald Glover’s comedy is still like nothing else on TV
It can seem like a trick of the memory but, back in 2016, Atlanta (Disney+), the most innovative and daring show on TV, began as a traditional sitcom. Sure, there was no laughter track or, really, any outright jokes, but it had the classic loser-everyman in luckless Earn (co-creator Donald Glover), Van (Zazie Beetz), the patient girlfriend whose affections Earn was always trying, and failing, to regain and an eye-rolling paternal figure in rap star cousin Paper Boi (Brian Tyree Henry). Earn even had that essential sitcom staple, the wacky friend – Darius (Lakeith Stanfield) – while his money-making schemes and modest dreams would always turn to ash just as they seemed within reach.
Yet, after the Emmy-winning, surrealist masterpiece of a second season, which dealt deftly, powerfully and occasionally breathtakingly with the issue of race in America, those early sitcom episodes felt like a ploy. Come for the sitcom putz, stay for the James Baldwin influenced, jazzinspired treatise on black America. When Stephen Glover – Donald’s brother and co-creator – said that season three is about the “the curse of whiteness”, no one batted an eyelid. It’s Atlanta, this is what it does.
This season, in a bold move, takes Earn and co out of Atlanta, Georgia, which has become a character in itself, and sends them around Europe on a tour with Paper Boi. This is a bracing experience for a white, middle class, British TV critic, who’d previously been able to distance Atlanta’s scabrous and mischievous takes on race. This was the country of Jim Crow and George Floyd – shame on you, white America. Now, however, we are in London and Amsterdam – where the black Georgians must contend with swathes of locals dressed as Zwarte Piet, a companion of St Nicholas who wears blackface at Christmas.
The season begins, however, back in Georgia with an episode, away from Earn and Paper Boi, about a black teenager, Loquareeous (Christopher Farrar), who ends up in foster care after the most minor of misdemeanours. The story that unfolds is gutwrenching, as Loquareeous is placed with a white lesbian hippy couple (Jamie Neumann and Laura Dreyfuss), who already have three young black foster children and terrifying ideas about raising them. The real horror, however, is when you realise it is based on a true story, that of Jennifer and Sarah Hart.
Atlanta’s Afrosurrealist, unfiltered views on black America and white Europe wouldn’t seem out of place in another art form, but in the cosy confines of a TV series (on Disney, no less) it seems an act of staggering radicalness. It goes without saying that it is a show with a strong flavour and it won’t be for everyone, but Atlanta is a true great of the form: the Great American Novel trapped inside a flatscreen TV. Chris Bennion
Press freedom is under threat. Not just from authoritarian regimes, but from a belief the world over that the mainstream media peddles fake news. That belief is baseless and dangerous – but I would say that, wouldn’t I?
Endangered (Sky Documentaries), an HBO film made by Ronan Farrow’s production company, follows a handful of journalists and photographers and documents the challenges they face. In Brazil, Patricia Campos Mello has reported critically on President Jair Bolsonaro. He responded by suggesting that she had offered sex to sources in return for negative information about him. In the eyes of millions of Brazilians, Patricia said, she is a whore.
In Mexico, at least 120 journalists have been murdered since 2000 and 90 per cent of those cases remain unsolved. Sashenka Gutierrez, a photographer for a Mexico City news agency, knew one of them personally. Her colleague was assassinated after publishing photos of police clashing with protesters.
And then there is the US, where we saw footage of one reporter being pepper sprayed by police and a CNN journalist being arrested at a George Floyd protest. Carl Juste, said that police intimidation had reached a new level. Meanwhile, distrust in the media, stoked by Donald Trump, led directly to the 2021 storming of the Capitol.
Mixed in with all of this was the decline of local newspapers – 25 per cent of US newspapers have closed since 2004 – and the rise of Youtube and Facebook. But this film about the importance of journalism was frustratingly light on actual journalism. Why are local newspapers closing? Why is faith in traditional journalism leaching away? What role do bad actors play? Watch The Undeclared War on Channel 4, a fictional tale, and you will learn far more about troll farms and coordinated fake news campaigns than you will here. Anita Singh
Atlanta ★★★★★
Endangered ★★