Harry Todd
Contributing Writer
Donald Glover got his break into the biz when Tina Fey hired him to be a writer for her fledgling show, 30 Rock, after seeing some of his comedy troupe’s work online. He quickly became one of the show’s most renowned writers for his bizarre, meta sense of humor before ultimately leaving the gig after three years in 2009. In the years since his humble 30 Rock beginnings, Glover has cranked out musical albums under the stagename of Childish Gambino, acted in four seasons of another NBC sitcom Community and has had small parts in movies here and there.
This past week, Glover also rolled out the first two episodes of his highly anticipated new TV show, Atlanta. The show follows Earn Marks (played by Glover), his rapper cousin Paper Boi and Darius, Paper Boi’s right hand man, on their path toward success in the Atlanta rap scene. Things get complicated by a gunshot outside of a convenience store.
After just two episodes, Atlanta shows a baffling amount of promise: it’s funny, it’s current and, most of all, it’s engaging to watch. Consider a scene from the second episode: While on a walk, Paper Boi encounters children reenacting the gunshot that sets off the season’s events. He interjects, saying that it’s not cool to do so, but the family immediately bats him off. Only after he says that he is Paper Boi does the family warm up to him. The scene, a clear meditation on fame, avoids coming across as overly thematic and heavy handed through the actors’ charismatic performances and Hiro Murai’s sleek directing (which will feel instantly familiar to those who’ve watched Childish Gambino’s music videos) while still retaining a sense of humor throughout.
Atlanta’s humor is rooted in the absurdism that Glover embraced during his time working for 30 Rock and Community. Darius’s non sequiturs and asides are particularly appealing, while letting Glover be the straight-man in increasingly absurd moments.
Jokes are delivered purely cinematically, too, such as the glow emanating from a particularly appetizing box of food, or a man in a Batman mask running into the background of the frame. Though absurd in many ways, Atlanta always feels grounded. This is the biggest strength of the show.
At the same pace that it delivers jokes, Atlanta offers nuanced insights into such potent topics as police brutality, transphobia and racism. Perhaps most importantly, the show never feels like it is congratulating itself for doing so; this depiction is simply the way life is. The unceremonious casualty is representative of the prevalence of these topics in day-to-day life, especially in the black communities that Atlanta so earnestly seeks to portray.
Atlanta lives or dies based on its writers. Thankfully, the largely untested and entirely black writing staff — an essentially unheard of setup, especially for a network consistently ranked as among the least diverse — succeeds in their lofty, ambitious goals. Pay attention to them: we’ll probably all be talking about them ten years from now — it’s clearly not that far from plausible.