Lena, meaner
WHY DONALD GLOVER’S ATLANTA IS THE UNLIKELY SUCCESSOR TO LENA DUNHAM’S GIRLS
Lena Dunham’s paradigm-shifting TV series, Girls, is about privileged young white women in New York. Donald Glover’s new series, Atlanta, is about underprivileged young black men in the city of the same name. And yet, youth aside, the two shows share a certain something. Both are made up of episodes that make you realise how much can be achieved on TV in 30 minutes. Both display a deft combination of comedy, drama and creative risk. And both come from writer-performers who were unable to find an existing niche to fit into, so went ahead and made their own.
Donald Glover has been a writer on Tina Fey’s 30 Rock, a long-serving cast member on cult US sitcom Community, and has a reasonably successful sideline as a rapper under the moniker Childish Gambino. But he’s never been able to take the centre-stage; even in his music he’s been viewed suspiciously as somehow too nerdy or clever (he went to New York’s prestigious Tisch School of the Arts).
Then he created Atlanta. A critical hit in the US, the new series, just launched in the UK, follows Earn, played by Glover himself, a geeky credit card salesman who is trying to scratch out a living for his baby daughter by managing his cousin Paper Boi’s burgeoning rap career. It might sound familiar, a rags-toriches drama of a young African-American man seeking a way out of deprivation through music, but like Dunham’s Girls, Atlanta is somehow unlike anything you’ve seen before.
For a start, it’s funny. When Earn, taking his estranged girlfriend on a dinner date he can’t afford, asks the waitress in desperation if he can have “a Miller High Life, like, the ones in the can”, she replies perkily, “We’ve got a hipster!” Meanwhile Paper Boi (Brian Tyree Henry) and his accomplice Darius (Keith Stanfield) form a comic double act reminiscent of Blackadder and Baldrick. Glover also drops in moments of surrealism — a takeaway chicken box that emits golden light like a treasure chest — or formal experimentation, like the second episode, largely contained in the waiting room of a police station jail.
But where Glover is most innovative is his refusal to restrict his characters to the stereotypical behaviour that black men of lower economic status are usually confined: yes, they might make rap music and break the law, but that doesn’t mean they can’t discuss the psycho-cultural significance of naming their firearms, or find doing a drug deal scary. The mix of humour, pathos, irreverence and poignancy is close to perfect. Finally, Donald Glover has made himself a glove that fits.
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Atlanta is on Saturdays at 10pm on Fox