Atlanta: Season 4

Paper Boi and his friends have returned to Atlanta after the end of his European tour. Back home, they find the same old same old, leading Earn to make a momentous decision.

Atlanta's MO has always been to use surrealism and even horror to illuminate what should have been a fairly basic premise: an Atlanta rapper hits the big time and hires his more grounded cousin to become his manager. The show not so much lowballs as absolutely forgets about that premise on a fairly regular basis to tell unrelated stories about everything else under the sun. In the third season, the show even chucked out its regular cast for almost half its run to become an anthology show.

The fourth and concluding season of the show returns to Atlanta and what vaguely approximates its standard format, of following its four main characters as they consider the next stage of their lives, such musings interrupted by horrendously awkward social situations, ill-considered monetary decisions and continuously pervasive racism.

If this was any other show, it'd be easy to say this was a "back to basics" season, but Atlanta's boundless inventiveness makes that a fairly meaningless statement. In the first episode alone, Darius is targeted by a scooter-bound woman who mistakes his genuine attempts to return an unwanted air fryer to Target during a riot as looting, Al follows an insane Scavenger Hunt to attend the funeral of his idol, and Earn and Van get lost in a mall seemingly inhabited by all of their ex-partners, forcing them into increasingly cringey small talk. Later episodes feature Earn undertaking one of the most elaborate and expensive petty revenge schemes in human history, Al being sucked into the terrifying world of managing young white rappers and Van getting stuck on a filming lot by a deranged showrunner (any similarities to real-life figures, of course, coincidental).

Compared to the third season's four anthology episodes unrelated to the main premise, this episode throws up only one, creating a fictitious alternate history where a junior animator is accidentally promoted to the CEO of Disney in 1992 and sets about making "the blackest movie of all time," which turns out to be the underrated animated masterpiece A Goofy Movie. Presented as a mockumentary with talking heads (a mixture of real-life figures and fictional Disney staff) and an undetectable dividing line between comedy and pathos, the episode is both hilarious and heartbreaking. It's also remarkable to see Disney (via FX) bankrolling and then showing something so critical of Disney.

The show ends, not with a bang or some kind of major climactic event (despite teasing Earn leaving the gang for Los Angeles all season), but instead a pretty ordinary day for the team, "ordinary" doing some heavy lifting as a concept there. The gang are stuck in a posh restaurant with arty food but are distracted by the proximity of a popular chicken fast food joint, whilst Darius undergoes a self-imposed existential crisis which can only be remedied by determining the dimensions of Judge Judy's posterior. Obviously.

Atlanta's final season (*****) is a well-deserved victory lap, the creators taking everything they've done so far and assembling a final ten episodes which are as inventive, bizarre and amusing as anything they've done to date. They don't go quite as random as the third season, but still keep up the consistency to a very high level. Walking away after such a run of episodes seems both crazy but also so Atlanta. We need more shows which are as fearless and unbound as this one (only channel-mate Reservation Dogs seems to be willing to go as far at the moment), but at least we have the forty-one episodes of this show to fall back on in the future. It's been a ride.

The entire run of Atlanta is available on Hulu in the United States and Disney+ in most of the rest of the world.

Thank you for reading The Wertzone. To help me provide better content, please consider contributing to my Patreon page and other funding methods.

Atlanta: Season 3

Paper Boi and his manager, Earn, have arrived in Europe for a tour and are soon joined by their friends Darius and Van. What should be a straightforward series of gigs becomes increasingly weird and convoluted, whilst Earn has a series of vivid dreams about what appear to be horror stories or alternate realities. Outside of the comfort zone of Atlanta, the group find themselves adrift.

Atlanta is a show that defies easy definitions. The project, headed by Donald Glover in collaboration with his brother Stephen and visionary director Hiro Murai, flirts with a standard setup where Glover plays the under-achieving cousin of a rising rap star, and manages to talk him into letting him become his manager. Shenanigans ensue. But the show undercuts, subverts or often just flat out ignores its own premise on a very frequent basis, dropping most of the cast to focus on one character, or forgetting its alleged status as a comedy-drama to instead turn into flat-out existential horror. In its first two seasons the show navigated these fluctuations with ease and verve.

For its much-delayed third season (arriving four years after the last), Atlanta flips the last vestiges of its format out the window. The gang are now in Europe, as Paper Boi's latest tour takes in Copenhagen, Amsterdam and London, among other cities. Perhaps unsurprisingly, even this is not as straightforward as it could be as Paper Boi experiences the worst trip of all time, Earn has to interrogate a suspected phone thief, Darius inadvertently destroys his favourite restaurant in London and Van experiences an identity crisis in Paris.

These voyages into the surreal - and they are even surreal by Atlanta's elastic standards of reality - are meticulously-crafted, intelligent slices of drama, comedy and horror intertwined with the show's traditional verve. But there are also only six episodes of them, in a ten-episode season. The show dedicates the remaining four episodes to almost completely stand-alone anthology stories.

The first is a flat-out horror, as a young boy's teacher mistakenly identifies him as being the victim of child abuse at home and he gets cycled into the care system, with decidedly unpleasant results. In the second, white Americans who are the descendants of slave-owners are forced to pay reparations to the descendants of their slaves, resulting is a seismic shift in society, and one white man rails against the new system. In a third episode, a white couple are completely reliant on their Trinidadian nanny are inconvenienced by her death, but baffled when their son asks to go to her funeral. This draws them into the life of someone they never really knew and barely ever thought about. And in the final story, a mixed-race, white-presenting high schooler is incensed when he loses out on a scholarship because of his appearance, leading to a questionable strategy for retaliation.

These four stand-alone episodes are each impressive - Three Slaps may emerge as Atlanta's creepiest instalment - and delve into themes the show has tapped into before, but in a freer way when they are detached from the show's normal cast and continuity. The Big Payback goes as far as taking place in a fantastical alternate-timeline. And all four episodes are hinted to be unusually vivid dreams that Earn is having during the European tour. It doesn't really matter since Atlanta has only a passing interest in making itself even vaguely realistic (remember this is a show which once featured an invisible car for the sheer hell of it). Instead, the stand-alones enhance the themes of the rest of the series, dealing with class, ambition and the complexities and hostility of interracial relations in America (and elsewhere). That they are brilliantly-written and directed is taken as read, but some may bemoan the limited screentime we have for our regulars; the last episode is almost a one-hander for Van (who herself is absent from most episodes), meaning that Earn, Darius and Paper Boi sit out a full half of the season.

That sounds churlish to the point of ridiculousness - who, by its third season, is watching Atlanta for a conventional narrative with a regular cast? - but there is also a slight sense of queasiness this season, of unease beyond the show's norm. The show is at its boldest and most experimental here but sometimes it feels like the experiments don't always pay off. Paper Boi being suckered into helping a company avoid corporate fall-out for its racism feels predictable, and the normally-affable Darius spends most of the season in a surprisingly dark place. The show complicating its (normally) most likeable character is a good move, but making him as dislikeable as they do here (particularly when he just bounces on Paper Boi, leaving him to the night from living hell) feels like a misstep. Van also spends most of the season on an extended strange journey separate to the rest of the characters, which feels initially disappointing - Zazie Beetz is the show's ultimate weapon of a performer, often floating around the fringes of episodes until she becomes the focus, when she absolutely kills it - but does pay off in the very clever finale.

Atlanta's third season (****½) is its boldest, strangest, weirdest, most scattershot and possibly patchiest. Perhaps you can even call it disappointing, in the same way that finding £500 on the street is disappointing after finding £600 the day before (twice!). But it's also maybe the most interesting and weirdly experimental of what is already an interesting and experimental show. The season is available to watch on Hulu in the USA and Disney+ in the UK.

Donald Glover to return as Lando Calrissian in STAR WARS TV series

Multiple reports surfaced today that Disney is in talks with Donald Glover for him to reprise his role as the young Lando Calrissian in a new Star Wars TV series, and may have already reached an agreement. Glover previously played the role in the spin-off movie Solo: A Star Wars Story.

Solo had a poor reception at the box office, becoming the first Star Wars film to fail to turn a profit in its initial theatrical run. Media and streaming sales were needed for it to turn green, and it's unclear if that's happened as yet. However, the film had a stronger critical reception, with most reviewers agreeing it was a fun - if not strictly necessary - addition to the mythos. The warmest plaudits were reserved for Glover, taking over the role handled by Billy Dee Williams in The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi (one he later resumed in The Rise of Skywalker).

The current rumours seem to be revolving around a Glover-starring mini-series set between Solo and A New Hope, a fertile time period which is also going to be explored in the upcoming Obi-Wan Kenobi mini-series and potentially The Bad Batch, a Clone Wars spin-off show about former clone troopers surviving during the rise of the Empire. Such a series would also allow Disney+ to revisit dangling plot threads from Solo without committing to a full movie sequel. Other rumours - which sound a lot more speculative - are even suggesting a two-pronged story featuring Williams as the older Lando following up on some of the plot threads from Rise of Skywalker, with extensive flashbacks to his younger self.

Glover himself is keeping busy, as he is currently developing the third and fourth seasons of his own show for FX, Atlanta, during lockdown.

Atlanta: Season 2

Earn is continuing to manage his cousin Alfred, whose career as rapper "Paper Boi" is blowing up. Alfred is unhappy with Earn's management style, whilst Earn feels that Alfred isn't taking advantage of social media and other opportunities to boost his profile. Meanwhile, it's "Robbin' Season" in Atlanta, the pre-Christmas crime spree, which results in a lot of weird stuff going down.

The first season of Atlanta was a mash-up of comedy, hard-hitting drama and bizarre psychological study. It cemented Donald Glover's (formerly of Community) position as a hot up-and-comer. After that season aired, Glover's music career (as Childish Gambino, of "This is America" fame) went stratospheric and he starred as a young Lando in the Star Wars movie Solo. Other castmembers also went big, with Lakeith Stanfield nailing a major role in Get Out and Zazie Beetz starring in Deadpool 2.

On that basis, it's perhaps a surprise we got a second season of Atlanta so soon, but Glover prioritised it and managed to create something even stranger, sadder, funnier and more heartwarming than the first season.

If Season 1 of Atlanta was a surrealist tone poem, Season 2 is a full-blown odyssey of the strange and the grotesque. It moves through a dense period of several weeks in which a lot of stuff goes down for the characters, so much that rather than try to cover events chronologically it instead splits the events between characters. This means we get few episodes where all the major characters appear, with instead most episodes focusing on a single character or group of characters. This results in an intense focus which at times feels claustrophobic, but this is appropriate for the stories that are being told.

Atlanta remains hilarious, with comic highlights including Darius and Earn trying to defuse a confrontation between Earn's insane uncle and the police, involving an alligator. A later episode sees Earn and Van defusing their relationship problems with a game of table tennis at a German party. Barbershop sees Alfred going for a simple haircut, but gets dragged into an increasingly hilarious road trip with his eccentric barber, whilst in Champagne Papi Van and her friends attend an offbeat house party where they hope to meet Drake. In North of the Border Earn, Darius and Alfred travel to a college campus to take part in a publicity event, but things go sideways and they end up taking refuge at a very uncomfortable frat boy initiation ceremony.

The season also goes dark, very dark. It feels like the shadow of the movie Get Out lies heavy on this season and Glover leans into it, delivering in Teddy Perkins possibly the freakiest 35 minutes of television of 2018. Woods is also a dark and depressing episode, but one that ends on a bizarrely redemptive note.

The season ends by coming almost full circle, as major events in the opening episode come to fruition (including one of the most literal uses of the Chekhov's Gun trope you'll ever see) and leaves things in an interesting place for the third season (which isn't expected to air until 2020).

The second season of Atlanta (*****) improves on the first to become a study in tension and tragicomedy, and has an infusion of horror running through it which is both incongruous and compelling. It remains one of the most unique and distinctive shows on air.

Atlanta: Season 1

Earnest "Earn" Marks is a man who feels his life is drifting aimlessly, with an unrewarding job and difficulties in supporting his young daughter and his on-off again girlfriend Van. When his cousin Alfred starts a rapping career under the stage name "Paper Boi", Earn convinces him to take him on as his manager. And then life gets even more complicated.

Atlanta is a very hard TV show to pin down. Created and partly written by Donald Glover (Community, Star Wars: Solo), who also stars as Earn, it's a strange show that moves between different tones with assured ease. It's a comedy about an intelligent young man who constantly feels let down by society and his idiotic peers, but who also makes plenty of his own mistakes. But it can also go quite dark: the first two episodes see Alfred shooting a man after a parking lot altercation and both him and Earn ending up in the police station, where Earn endures a stark and uncomfortable night alongside drug-dealers, violent criminals and brutal cops.

Later episodes go out-and-out surreal. An entire episode is spent with Alfred as a guest on a strange Atlanta talk show, whilst another is set in a nightclub with secret doors and a lunatic rich guy who apparently drives an invisible car. Another episode revolves entirely around a search for a missing jacket, and another feels like the prototype for the movie Get Out, with Earn enduring the increasingly disturbing attention of a middle-aged white man who is crawling with inappropriately over-earnest guilt for slavery (co-star Lakeith Stanfield also has a prominent role in Get Out, which feels appropriate).

Atlanta is weird and fluid, flowing from being a show about one thing into a show about another. At first it's difficult to know if you even like the show or not: is it a comedy? A drama? A surrealistic visual tone poem? But the final analysis is that Atlanta is meant to represent Earn's life, which for all of its specific elements is a life pretty much like anyone else's, which moves from being funny to sad to being busy to being boring and back again.

What Atlanta remains throughout, however, is both entertaining and compelling. The direction (some of it by Glover himself) is remarkable, drawing the viewer into each episode's unique set-up. The writing is always sharp, the dialogue often joyously clever (especially when Earn gets up to speed and starts cutting down other people's idiocies with withering contempt), the characters immensely interesting even when they're not the most likeable. Earn may be (most of the time) our viewpoint character, but it's his long-suffering sort-of girlfriend Vanessa (an assured performance by Zazie Beetz) who emerges as one of the strongest characters, someone with drive and ambition but lacking the resources to fully achieve her goals.

Atlanta may not always be a comedy (despite its billing as a comedy-drama), but when it is it's the funniest show on television. Lakeith Stanfield's performance as philosopher-stoner Darius, master of the non sequitur, provides some of the show's best moments, but all of the cast have their moment in the sun.

Atlanta's first season (****½) is smart, engaging and endlessly inventive television. A second season aired earlier this year and a third season has been commissioned.