Tuesday, March 21, 2017

Atlanta (2016-Present)

Despite a slow start, Donald Glover’s new sitcom wound up really winning me over.  By the time the Golden Globes came around, I was thrilled with its awards and ready for season 2 (even though it sounds like that won’t happen until 2018 – ah, the double-edged sword of your in-demand star/creator being in a Star Wars movie.)

Earn is a guy who doesn’t quite have it together, though he’d like to.  He feels stuck in a dead-end job that earns him little-to-nil and crashes with Van, his baby mama ex with whom he has a complicated relationship.  When he finds out his cousin Alfred has gone viral as “Paper Boi” with a rap single he released online, Earn sees a chance to fulfill his dream of getting into music management – a gig that, as it happens comes with no guarantee of success, a steep learning curve, and almost no money upfront.  Amid learning the ins and outs of the rap world and getting tangled up in some truly outrageous situations, Earn struggles to balance what he wants to do with what he needs to do.

This show is weird in the best way.  It starts out a bit deceptively for how wild it ends up being – the first couple episodes are a bit more meandering, not exactly slice-of-life but not especially out there.  As it goes on, however, the humor gets a lot bolder and plots get a lot crazier.  There’s some outright fantastical stuff, like casting a young Black actor as Justin Bieber or rumors about a rich rapper with a pimped-out invisible car.  There are satirical situations that get ramped up to an insane level, like a pretentious Black talk show’s interview with a “transracial” kid who identifies as a middle-aged white man or a super-bourgey Juneteenth party, wherein the white host won’t shut up about his “pilgrimage” to Africa.  And there’s just fun off-the-wall stuff, like a club owner with a talent for vanishing into thin air when Earn approaches him about payment or (hilarious) supporting character Darius getting into an argument about why it’s wrong to bring a poster of a dog to the shooting range when everyone else is shooting at posters of humans.

It has a nice way of approaching issues like racism, stereotypes (Alfred is “cast” as the “thug rapper” very early on and feels pressure to stay in the box that’s been made for him,) poverty, social advancement, and feeling like you’re still floundering when you know you’re supposed to be getting it together.  These subjects – even heavy ones like police violence – are looked at through such a smart, sadrdonic lens that the show is able to make really strong points hit home without ever feeling soapboxy.

For me, the characters also start out feeling a little remote but quickly settle into themselves and become really watchable.  While my instinct is always to think Troy when I see Glover, he does an excellent job of separating from that and showing me how different Earn is.  This is my first time seeing Brian Tyree Henry and Zazie Beetz, who are both terrific as Alfred and Van, respectively.  Pound for pound, though, my favorite is the offbeat, nutty Darius, played to deadpan perfection by Lakeith Stanfield.

Warnings

Swearing (including the N-word,) violence, drugs/drinking/smoking, sexual content, some gross-out humor, and thematic elements.

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