ATLANTA WEAVES A HYPNOTIC TALE
Donald Glover’s timely new FX series offers viewers a welcome take on a stereotyped world
FX’s Atlanta — magnificently conceived by and starring Donald Glover — doesn’t begin so much as it simply happens, opening with a confrontation in a conveniencestore parking lot and immediately shifting to morning light, where Glover, as Earnest (Earn) Marks, wakes from a dream next to Van (Zazie Beetz), the mother of his baby daughter, Lottie.
As they wipe the sleep from their eyes and get on with their days, it’s up to viewers to orient ourselves to Atlanta’s casual pace and glean some details about its characters’ lives: Earn is only an occasional visitor in Van’s house; she implores him to help out more with the rent and his daughter’s care. He has the desire, but lacks the plan. When he steps outside, we get a sense of both the splendour and blight of the show’s inner-suburb setting: verdant, kudzu-covered cul-de-sacs of low-income housing and potholed streets with gas stations where the clerks are protected by thick layers of Plexiglas.
It’s tempting to jump to conclusions about bad neighbourhoods (and what typically occurs there on other TV shows), yet Atlanta immediately and effortlessly imbues its environs with a tender sense of home and community, where hardship is a backdrop rather than an agenda item. Creators and producers are fond of talking up a TV show’s setting as becoming a character in and of itself, which is often just talk. In Atlanta’s case, the setting is a vital, narrative throughline — and a welcome take on a stereotyped world.
Atlanta, which premièred Sept. 6 with two episodes, was filmed in and around East Point, Ga., which was once dinged by a real-estate website as “the nation’s most dangerous suburb.” From the show’s first moments, Glover and his collaborators have given this place the kind of respect and unvarnished regard that is somewhat similar to the love and concern with which David Simon and company portrayed Baltimore in The Wire — only in this case, gallows humour supplants pathos. (Glover has drawn on his own Atlanta upbringing and his experiences as a rapper — which might be news to viewers who only know him from his roles on Community or in The Martian.)
It is across this landscape — back and forth by punishingly long bus routes — that Earn meanders from one possibility to the next.
In short order we meet Earn’s parents, Riley and Gloria (Isiah Whitlock Jr. and Myra Lucretia Taylor), who won’t give their son any more money or let him in their house (“I can’t afford it,” Riley says), yet remain reliable babysitters for their granddaughter. Earn, who makes $5.15 an hour at a Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport terminal, where he unsuccessfully tries to sign up people for a new credit card, discovers that his cousin, Alfred (Brian Tyree Henry), is blowing up in the rap scene with a self-produced mixtape, using the name Paper Boi.
Earn offers to become Alfred’s manager, but Alfred is leery of his cousin’s sudden presence.
The first episode would seem to indicate that Atlanta might settle comfortably as another rags-toriches dramedy filled with the usual cautions about showbiz success, in the vein of HBO’s Ballers (or Entourage), only with far fewer luxury items and a lead character who has trouble affording a Happy Meal.
The second episode suggests something broader and more ambitious — and is also circumspect about where it’s taking us or what kind of show it wants to be. Much of what happens, when not enveloped in a literal marijuana haze, unfolds in a slow, dreamy state.
For better, weirder and certainly blunter thoughts about life and everything else, Atlanta leans heavily on the comic relief of Darius, played by Lakeith (Keith) Stanfield, who is Alfred’s right-hand man and often so stoned he’s on another (sometimes brilliant) plane of logic altogether.
The episodes surf hypnotically along, succeeding less on thematic concerns and more on Atlanta’s unerring knack for portraiture. The show introduces us to its world and its inhabitants without declaring its intent in every other scene.
Some of the intent, of course, has already been predetermined for Atlanta: It’s a show about black men living far afield of society’s white mainstream, which is burden enough. In both a topical and cultural sense, Atlanta couldn’t have picked a better time to come at us with its mix of comedy and anger.
Many viewers, of all races, are hungry for more shows that can weave outrage and narrative and everyday life together as effortlessly as this one does.