Muristek
Donald Glover’s unique comedy drama returns with biting commentary and unsettling horror, defying genre and upending expectations
The long anticipated third season of Atlanta begins with a lesson on whiteness. In the premiere, Three Slaps, a white man tells his Black companion that the remnants of an all-Black city, flooded by the government, lies beneath the lake where they are fishing so late at night. Barely a glimmer of skepticism crosses the Black man’s face; such horror falls quite believably within the realm of possibility (this lake is almost certainly based on Lake Lanier in Georgia, to say nothing of countless other razed Black enclaves across the country). “The thing about being white is it blinds you,” the white man muses, before he turns to the camera with his eyes sealed shut.
Atlanta boasts some of the most sophisticated storytelling in recent years, a genre-defying venture to trace the intricacies of its particularly compelling characters and inevitably Black life. The show’s individuality coalesces under the sleek vision of its heavyweight creative team: namely, creator and star Donald Glover, his screenwriter brother Stephen Glover, director Hiro Murai and executive producer Stefani Robinson (also behind FX’s What We Do in the Shadows). The series so successfully evaded the “sophomore slump” that its lengthy hiatus – initially to accommodate the meteoric rise of its cast (a superhero film for Brian Tyree Henry, two for Zazie Beetz, and an Oscar nomination for LaKeith Stanfield) – was met, understandably, with a widespread groan. The premiere marks a triumphant, if somewhat unusual return: the principal characters – Al, the rapper better known as Paper Boi (Henry), his manager-cousin Earn (Glover), Al’s best friend Darius (Stanfield), and Earn’s ex-girlfriend Van (Beetz), with whom he shares a toddler – are largely absent. But the episode remains true to the show’s fundamental architecture: a series of oneiric forays into the surreal.
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