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
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