Review: ‘Atlanta’ Is Back And As Surprising As Ever


The last time we left “Atlanta” was about four years ago, also a thousand years ago, and also a few minutes ago.

Season 2 ended on FX in 2018. It’s been a long hiatus, even for a show that has always moved with its own fluid sense of time. Since then, a pandemic has (to begin with), the attack on the Capitol, and the murder of George Floyd, racial reckoning that echoes a theme of this richly drawn show: What’s life like for Black Americans like the series’ characters? whose fate can turn in an instant.

If “Atlanta” has always been difficult to understand—except when it’s comedy, drama, horror—it may be because it has to do with complex people whose circumstances are always just one impulse away from any of these. And the two-episode Season 3 premiere, which aired on Thursday, “Atlanta” at its best maintains that unsettling feeling of never knowing how backdrops might change as you go to new places.

When we catch up with Alfred, the rapper Paper Boi (Brian Tyree Henry); manager-cousin Earn (Donald Glover); and his friends Darius (LaKeith Stanfield) and Van (Zazie Beetz), life seems to have gotten better, at least financially. Alfred is touring Europe, but not the tour he started when he was still an aspiring artist at a break in his career at the end of Season 2.

He returned to Europe as a headliner while preparing to play a show in Amsterdam. He can ask for an advance of 20,000 euros for his wages, take it without complaint, and throw handfuls of cash at the fans who throw him on the street. These hotels have chauffeurs, luxury hotels, and one-night stands.

Characters are now in a different place in more than one way. The time warp manages to pick up where the series left off at the same time and move the story forward in time.

But before we get to that, there is a deviation. The spectacular and haunting first episode apparently begins on a boat somewhere in Georgia, far from the main characters. We are told that the lake covers the ruins of a self-sufficient Black town that was flooded when a dam was built. (There is an embarrassing situation real life history dams, lakes, even Central Park.) Beneath the dark surface, the story continues, vengeful ghosts await.

Then the story shifts to Loquareeous (Christopher Farrar), a troubled Black boy who is forced to live with two white women after a school employee witnesses a scene of corporal punishment and calls child service. (This premise is also a disturbing true story, murder-suicide two women and six adopted children.)

His hippie-like new moms shorten his name to “Larry” and counsel him on the unhealthy “foods you’re used to.” They encourage their children to unconsciously sing field songs while working in the organic garden. The house is shabby, food is scarce, and Loquareeous remembers a warning from her biological mother: “These white people, they’re going to kill you.”

Being in this “Atlanta”, the story takes several surreal and unexpected turns. Then he drops us to a hotel room in Europe. “Atlanta” has always been a series that reaches its destination by side roads and goes beyond the subject. But what does one story have to do with another? Directly, not much. Thematically, everything.

For Alfred, Amsterdam seems like the opposite of a horror story. When we find him in the second episode, he is arrested, recalling his and Earn’s arrest at the beginning of “Atlanta.” But here, the police are willing. A gourmet meal is served in his cozy cell and he is immediately released. It is welcomed, hosted and respected as Paper Boi in Europe.

But wait. December in the Netherlands – the season of Christmas and “Zwarte Piet” sidekick of Sinterklaas (Santa Claus), traditionally depicted with a black face. Here, there, and everywhere, there are macroaggressions stained with soot—a boy on a bicycle, a doorman in a hotel—that the Dutch reject as harmless entertainment.

Alfred’s exhaustion – Henry can play nervous fatigue with a thousand different tones – says it all. Suddenly, we’re back at the lake where, no matter how safe you think you are today, those ghosts of history can appear to lure you under. We are in a different kind of horror story where the unexamined ignorance of supposedly tolerant people can hit as hard as open hostility.

My colleague Wesley Morris wrote about it last week. award ceremony event Black tennis stars Serena and Venus Williams have collateral damage from a light hit by white director Jane Campion. “One minute they’re presenting, the next they’re bursting through a trap door.” Alfred’s experience in this “Atlanta” episode could be a farsighted explanation. Fame, success, can be your VIP ticket. However, even the quaint cobbled streets turned out to be trap doors.

According to FX, most of Season 3 will take place in Europe, which raises questions. What is “Atlanta” without Atlanta? And what is their hometown according to the characters? Is it a place they can go or a date they always carry with them?

The familiarly confusing and strikingly shot first episodes by long-time “Atlanta” director Hiro Murai suggest an answer. Atlanta is where these characters seek satisfaction, purpose, and balance. The two episodes sent to critics for review are just a glimpse, but they give no indication that the series has lost a foothold in the past four years. Perhaps the pause gave him time to catch up.



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