A show about nothing—and everything

‘Atlanta’ breathes new life into TV comedy without breaking a sweat

FX’s comedy-drama hybrid “Atlanta” is truly unlike anything else on television. 

Created by and starring actor-rapper-writer-comedian Donald Glover—best known as the lovable doofus Troy from “Community,” or as Grammy-nominated hip-hop artist Childish Gambino—the show’s singularity is no wonder: most of the people responsible for making it have never made a TV show before. Its chief director, Hiro Murai, is a veteran of music videos who had never worked in narrative fiction. And the all-black writers room is filled with mostly newbies who have shown they have no problem throwing out the TV writer’s rulebook. 

In the pilot episode we meet Earn (Glover), a floundering Princeton dropout back in his hometown of Atlanta, broke and aimless and a little awkward. He (sort-of) lives with his on-again-off-again girlfriend Van (Zazie Beetz) and their baby daughter. When he learns that his cousin Alfred (Brian Tyree Henry) is making waves in the local hip-hop scene under the alias Paper Boi, Earn seeks him out and offers to manage him. Paper Boi and his right-hand-man Darius (the hilarious, scene-stealing Keith Stanfield) are skeptical of Earn at first, but reluctantly accept him into their world. 

With this basic dynamic introduced, the lives of Earn and Van and Paper Boi and Darius simply continue on. And for all the impressive character development and world building the show achieves in a ten-episode season, not much actually happens. Not in a traditional sense anyway.

By season’s end, Paper Boi’s profile in the local rap game seems to have marginally increased. Earn and Van’s relationship has grown in mutual understanding and empathy. But neither of those developments moves the needle in the transformative way typical of most character-driven fiction. 

These are just people. Things just happen. Some of these things are shown on screen; some aren’t. Some are presented with gritty hyper-realism. Some are presented with almost farcical surrealism. It’s breezy and funny. It’s dark and melancholy. Often, it’s all of these things in the same scene. 

And all of that is a testament to the courage of the writers and directors—and, certainly, the creator—to make the show they wanted to make, not what a TV show is “supposed to be.” 

For instance, one entire episode depicts a fictional public access news program with a panel discussion in which Paper Boi argues with a stuffy academic about transphobia among the black community. (And it’s much funnier and more profound than that description makes it sound.) Another episode abandons Earn and Paper Boi altogether to follow Van as she has a tense dinner with an old friend—a narrative luxury too rarely afforded female characters in otherwise male-centric shows. Another finds Paper Boi in a celebrity basketball game with a young, arrogant, entitled black celebrity inexplicably named Justin Bieber. The “climactic” finale is as unassuming as all the other episodes, as Earn searches for a jacket he lost the previous night at a club. The episode, and the season, ends with Earn retiring to a storage locker that doubles as a depressing makeshift apartment. He lies on a futon, turning over a pair of hundred dollar bills in his hands—and, because of everything we’ve seen him go through in ten episodes, the way we’ve come to adore these characters and savor their small victories, it’s enormously satisfying. 

Since its debut, “Atlanta” has often been compared with “Master of None,” the Netflix series from creator Aziz Ansari. That comparison is valid in many ways, but it’s a bit lazy. Both shows exist because an extraordinarily gifted, non-white comedian was given enough creative license to execute a unique vision—mostly left alone and spared the usual tinkering from outside forces. Both offer a point of view we don’t see enough of in popular culture, especially in directly tackling what it’s like to navigate a society that continually marginalizes one’s experience and point of view. But “Master of None,” while an excellent show, does this in a more overt way—as if it’s trying to teach the audience lessons. “Atlanta” isn’t didactic; it’s simply showing a group of well-drawn characters living their lives in a specific corner of the world. The ways it illuminates issues of race and class—and it does so brilliantly—arise organically from that framework.

In an interview leading up to the premiere of “Atlanta,” Glover told New York Magazine’s Rembert Browne that he doesn’t want his art to be of a certain time and place. He wants to make “classics” that will live on, will continue to mean different things to different people as time passes. 

“The second season of ‘Atlanta’ will be a classic,” he said in that piece, probably because he thought his team might need a year under their belts before really finding their footing. 

With all due respect to his humility, Glover’s prediction was off by exactly one season. 

“Atlanta” is already there. 

For more from Matt, read his review of HBO’s ‘Westworld.’