If you're confused by the bizarre season premiere of 'Atlanta,' here's why you should keep watching
- "Atlanta," which returns after a four-year hiatus on Thursday, has swapped Europe for the southern city.
- The season is an audacious, challenging, and hilarious experiment in TV comedy.
Black art can never exist in a void.
When the lives, stories, and faces of Black people are presented through an artistic medium, they become part of the history of the art form, the history of race, and a yardstick for representation.
Take, for instance, the poster for the new season of Donald Glover's award-winning show "Atlanta." On the canvas — which has donned billboards and taxi cabs in major cities across the world — the faces of Earn, Darius, Alfred, and Van, the show's primary cast, are pulled and enlarged into surreal configurations that resemble the famous shapes and forms of Pablo Picasso and Salvador Dalí.
The poster was created by the Wilmington, Delaware-based artist Alim Smith, who has won acclaim for his surreal paintings that are heavily inspired by the two European masters. Most of Smith's paintings feature Black figures from popular culture or recreations of Black internet memes.
While Smith's work is bold, humorous, and inventive, it's also subversive: He is, in effect, repurposing European-created syle and conferring it upon Black American culture, which has largely been ignored in art history discourse.
Throughout the history of visual culture, there have been people who have questioned the potency of such work. "The master's tools will never dismantle the master's house," Black feminist author Audre Lorde once famously argued.
Conversely, in "Who Will Pay Reparations on My Soul," a searing collection of essays on culture, politics, and criticism, writer Jesse McCarthy argues that while repurposing established forms may never be sufficient to completely dismantle the order of things, it can help push society toward new ideas. "New keys can unlock new doors that open onto unsuspected basements," McCarthy wrote.
Glover's masterful comedy "Atlanta" has managed to bypass the weight of such heavy metaphysical arguments through sheer inventiveness. Across two award-winning seasons, "Atlanta" has discarded traditional TV conventions and offered audiences a wild, winding, and hyper-unique tale of Blackness in contemporary America.
The show's third season, which debuts on FX Thursday night, continues to unspool with complete disregard for established rules. Instead, it presents an audacious, challenging, and hilarious experiment in TV comedy.
'Atlanta' continues to discard all established TV conventions from its first episode.
The first episode back, "Three Slaps," is a dense, standalone narrative.
None of the show's main cast appears except for one ambiguous appearance by Glover as Earn late in the episode. Instead, the season three premiere follows the terrifying odyssey of Loquareeous (Christopher Farrar), a Black middle-schooler who is unfairly plucked out of his home and placed in foster care after a white school social worker calls Child Protective Services following a choice meeting with his mother and grandfather.
Loquareeous's new parents are Amber (Laura Dreyfuss) and Gayle (Jamie Neumann), a white soft-spoken hipster couple who farm Kombucha and other foods. The pair have three other foster children, all Black.
Your suspicions will immediately start to simmer. They'll be confirmed when the kids are put to work in the family's garden. The episode's details are wonderfully specific and horrifying, but its narrative points hit harder the less you know. So, for now, think of it as this season's Teddy Perkins.
The season's second episode, which airs directly after the opener, returns us to the characters we know. Alfred (Brian Tyree Henry) is touring Europe, but it's not the tour he was starting at the end of season two when he was still an aspiring artist.
Alfred has returned to Europe as a famous headliner. There are drivers and fancy hotels, groupies, and crazy rockstar one-night stands. Alfred is even able to ask for a 20,000 euro advance on his performance fee, get it without complaint, and use it to toss handfuls of cash to the fans who lined the street for him.
It's Christmas season in Holland, which is also the season of "Zwarte Piet," Sinterklaas's (Santa Claus) famous elf who is traditionally depicted in blackface. Earn and Alfred, as well as Darius and Van (who are on their own winding mystery in the European city), encounter soot-covered transgressions all over the city, which the Dutch dismiss as harmless fun. At the hilarious conclusion of the episode, Earn successfully runs into a room of Zwarte Piet-clad people to evade an angry promoter.
At times, the bold leaps of the show's premiere episode can make episode two feel a little tame, but "Sinterklaas is Coming to Town" does start to chip away at the question created by the show's move overseas: How does "Atlanta" change without the stories living and breathing in the southern city?
The episode suggests that the show doesn't change.
The challenges we face may shift in appearance — European blackface is subbed in for the smoldering racism of the American south — but the heart of "Atlanta" lies in the frictions created as these characters desperately try to survive and discover their purpose.
We often don't know what we are watching, but it's striking and visceral — much like the show's characters.
The premiere episodes are familiarly unsettling and strikingly shot by Hiro Murai, the longtime "Atlanta" director. Murai has a talent for displaying both absurdity and dread in seemingly banal moments. His visual language is shrewd, emotional, and precise.
Murai's trademarks — sharp cuts, washed-out palettes, extended long shots — create a simmering dread that hangs over the lives of the show's characters. This visual fog is the perfect match for the avant-garde construction of the show's narrative. Together, Murai's camera and the show's narrative structure create a unique type of viewership: We often don't know what we are watching, but it's striking and visceral — much like the unpredictable lives of the characters on the show.
Two episodes aren't a sufficient sample to comprehensively survey a season of "Atlanta." It's still unclear where the story might lead or who will be along for the ride. But these two episodes are sufficient to confirm the show and its creators haven't lost a step after four years away from our screens.
Glover and his co-writers — which includes his brother Stephen Glover — have decided to jump further into the unknown."Atlanta" is an example of what can be achieved when a group of artists refuses to reduce themselves to what others demand and instead assume the position they feel to be true.
At times, this can make the show an uncomfortable watch. But if you stick with it, the rewards can be endless.
"Atlanta" airs weekly on FX and is available to stream on Hulu.