Atlanta is named after the home town of its star and creator, Donald Glover. But it is set somewhere else entirely: a circuit-fryingly weird and hallucinatory alternate dimension straight from Glover’s febrile imagination. And as it debuts its third season on Disney + this week, it is that exhilarating strangeness that marks it as the most revolutionary comedy on TV.
And that is despite a relatively straightforward premise. Glover plays Earnest “Earn” Marks, a hustling Ivy League drop-out who has become the manager of his cousin, the rapper Alfred “Paper Boi” Miles (Brian Tyree Henry). Earn’s life is complicated by an on/off relationship with Vanessa (Zazie Beetz), with whom he has a child. And by Alfred’s friendship with eccentric side-kick Darius (LaKeith Stanfield).
So far, so sitcom. However, there are no jokes on Atlanta. Or, at least, no set-up/punchlines gags of the kind that have been a feature of practically every US small-screen comedy since year dot, including Glover’s own break-out giggle-fest Community.
Atlanta began in 2016 as a relatively low-profile vehicle for the actor and rapper (he releases pummelling hip-hop as Childish Gambino).
Yet with episodes featuring Glover in “white-face” and starring a “Black Justin Bieber” – which asked the viewer to assume Justin Bieber was African-American and run with it – Atlanta quickly revealed itself to be something else. It was a delivery mechanism for Glover’s musings on race and class in America – and for an askew storytelling style that owed more to Twin Peaks than Two and a Half Men.
Arriving after a pandemic-enforced delay, series three finds Glover at the height of his powers and in no mood for taking prisoners. Here is State of the Nation TV, addressing the existential crises afflicting the United States as it tries to come to terms with the toxic legacy of racial injustice.
This is spelt out hauntingly in the first episode, in which two friends – white and black – fish on a lake. The white fisherman explains that beneath Lake Lanier (an actual reservoir outside Atlanta) is an African-American town that was flooded by the state of Georgia. As he leans in to hear more, the black fisherman sees his friend transformed into an eyeless demon. At which point, newcomers to Atlanta will realise they are a very long way from the comforting guffaws of Friends.
This set up of a banal conversation taking a turn for the horrific comes straight from Lynch and Twin Peaks. But where Twin Peaks was set in a through-the-looking-glass version of small-town white America, Atlanta is far more attuned to real-world issues.
This we see as we then flash to Loquareeous (Christopher Farrar), a restless young black boy separated from his mother by well-meaning teachers and sent to live with two toxic hippies (a premise partly based on the real-life case of 12-year-old African American Devonte Hart).
It’s horrible and yet behind the suffering is a cosmic dark joke confirming that Atlanta is a comedy, albeit of the most skewed variety imaginable. Glover is showing us how minorities are rendered powerless in America – even by white people who think they are doing the right thing. The punchline is that white paternalism can kill you.
Extraordinarily, none of this has anything at all do to with the series proper, which, in the second instalment, circles back around to Paper Boi and entourage. They’re in Amsterdam for a tour and their struggles to conduct themselves like a professional musical unit yield some relatively straightforward cringe-comedy – one recurring joke being Earn’s refusal to pay for anything. It isn’t terribly far removed from Larry David during Curb Your Enthusiasm’s imperial phase. Or even Ricky Gervais when he was funny (if you can cast your mind back that far).
Ultimately, though, Glover has no interest in delivering even relatively straightforward laughs and we’re soon down the rabbit hole again. You may have already heard about the surreal, even by Atlanta standards, episode in which Liam Neeson plays “Liam Neeson”. And in which he apologises – unironically and with conspicuous sincerity – for his bizarre “black” rant from 2019.
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I will dance around the specifics in order to avoid spoilers, but suffice to say Neeson’s on-screen apology feels entirely heartfelt. He isn’t doing a bit – it’s not one of those toe-curling cameos where a celeb plays an insufferable version of themselves. But that earnestness is juxtaposed with Paper’s Boi’s droll disbelief at what he is witnessing.
It is one of those moments when Atlanta grabs you by the collar and spins you around. As a viewer you don’t know which way is up or down. Is this a sketch? A meta-critique of cancel culture? Or is Neeson just standing up and staying sorry?
It is possibly all three at once. Above all, it is darkly, hysterically funny. And that is the genius of Atlanta – a comedy that is full of horror and bleak chuckles. And that has the powerful – ultimately reassuring – message that, given the choice, it’s better to laugh than to cry or shriek into the void.
Atlanta is streaming on Disney+