Atlanta season 3 is meandering, implosive and weird — and we need more TV like it

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The latest season of Atlanta is weird. That may sound like stating the obvious. Atlanta is supposed to be weird. Its first two seasons, which aired in 2016 and 2018, established it as exceptionally inventive, unpredictable and adventurous television.

And the weirdness is not the only thing, of course. Atlanta would have been essential viewing anyway, with four of the most appealing and relatable characters on screens big or small, performed by four of the best actors working today; consistently brilliant writing; and uniquely observant depictions of Black America, the music industry, and the vibrant culture of its namesake city.

But showrunner and star Donald Glover has a burning need to always challenge, provoke or even disturb his audience.

I don’t just mean the more comically strange story elements — hoverboards, invisible cars, Justin Bieber depicted as a Black man. And not just the standalone episodes like the spectacular creepfest “Teddy Perkins” (here’s my old review of that amazing episode, and of season 2). Let’s rewind and start with the basic premise: it’s a show that chronicles the up-and-coming career of a rapper, but we hardly ever get to hear his music.

I watched a season and a half of Atlanta before I realized this was a deliberate choice, and central to the whole mood of the show. Before that, I’d watched episode after episode feeling vaguely frustrated about that without ever being able to name it. If anything I’d assumed we’d get to hear the music at some climactic point, and that it would be awesome — especially with a showrunner who, of course, happens to be a very accomplished musician.

But we aren’t supposed to hear Paper Boi’s music. Once that clicked, the whole thing made more sense to me.

At a basic level, this functions as commentary on how the music itself is often secondary in the music business, especially in the 21st century, with the increasing focus on image, publicity, social media and corporate sponsorship.

But there’s more to it I think. Atlanta has always been a show about frustration, about being between things, being in a liminal state, striving and not getting anywhere — or, as is the case with season 3, getting somewhere (a headlining tour in Europe) and finding it’s not what you hoped it would be. The frustration is the point.

And the way that frustration is communicated viscerally to the audience is that we don’t get to hear the music. That’s absolutely brilliant, and really sets Atlanta apart from lesser fare. But it’s also very odd, and unsettling.

So the weirdness is not new. But with season 3, that disruptive instinct takes center stage. It’s the thing you’ll remember most when you think of this season. Glover and his collaborators (among them screenwriter and brother Stephen Glover, director Hiro Murai, and executive producer/screenwriter Stefani Robinson) take their commitment to the abstract, ambiguous and anarchic to another level. New characters are introduced and then disappear. Storylines are left hanging. Ominous events are foreshadowed and then seemingly forgotten. There’s a lot of extra-disturbing stuff here: graphic depictions of suicide, attempted child murder, a climactic gag about cannibalism straight from a splatter movie. The mood of a scene often abruptly shifts — from sentiment to horror, or from grief to comedy. From one scene to the next it becomes increasingly difficult to tell whether what we’re seeing is a dream, or an alternate timeline, or what.

Most significantly, several episodes don’t relate to the main characters or main storyline at all. This is especially jarring because Glover, Zazie Beetz, Brian Tyree Henry and LaKeith Stanfield are all much bigger stars than they were when season 2 let out four long years ago (incidentally here’s my review of Boots Riley’s wonderful Sorry to Bother You, from 2018, which stars Stanfield). They are such a pleasure to watch, either on their own, or especially together with their amazing chemistry; we just want to see more of them.

When Earn, Al, Van and Darius do appear, it’s hardly more comforting. On their European odyssey, they’re all lost in one way or another. They’re adrift, anxious, uncertain, artistically paralyzed, freaking out, pretending to be people they aren’t, becoming people they don’t like. Weird shit happens to them (even weirder than usual).

Of course Atlanta is not just weird for its own sake; it has more to say than most series. It’s about what it is to be Black, not only in America but in this world (the writers are unsparing in reminding us how racist Europe can be). It’s also, paradoxically, about what it is to be white, especially in relation to Blackness. There are memorable episodes about reparations and affirmative action. It alludes to real-world incidents of horrific racist violence.

But Glover and company don’t do anything straightforwardly. The ambiguity, the creepiness and the detachment from the main narrative start with the very first scene of the season. A Black man and his white friend fish on a lake in Georgia late at night and discuss whether the lake is haunted. As the white friend explains, the lake was engineered by flooding a valley in the 1950s, after the Black residents were all driven out. This is based on the real history of Lake Lanier, though, as the linked article points out, the episode takes some liberties with the facts.

Then the scene takes an eerie, ghostly turn. It’s deliciously scary, but also a sharp commentary on white supremacy, and we’re hungry to find out more.

But we don’t find out more. It turns out this was just a prologue and doesn’t connect at all to the rest of the episode — about a Black schoolkid who encounters a different kind of horror when he’s adopted by a white family — and neither part connects to the main narrative about Earn and friends, whose stories don’t kick in until the second episode.

The prologue does serve to establish the theme of ghosts and hauntings, which will recur during the season, as well as the running critique of whiteness. But, in seemingly going nowhere, it also leaves a gnawing anxiety, like an itch that won’t be scratched.

And why is it the white guy who’s telling his Black friend about the lake’s racist history? Who knows, but it’s very “Atlantian” to invert the dynamic like that.

Some critics seem to think all this is a bad thing. Glover has been accused this season of being self-indulgent, or unfocused, or weird for the sake of being weird. I found these 10 episodes so refreshing amidst all the heavy-handedness and predictable pacing and tropey tropes that define virtually every other series, even the tolerable ones. I found myself thinking about each episode for days, trying to unravel the mysteries.

In this way, Atlanta is much more like cinema than TV. It has an arthouse feel — not meaning it’s pretentious (though it could be accused of that too I guess), but meaning it has a sense of adventure, a trust in the audience’s intelligence, and a sheer delight in playing with ideas and narrative and images (as usual, it’s beautifully shot, by Stephen Murphy and Christian Sprenger).

Especially at a time when we’re caught in a dystopian feedback loop and TV programming is getting dumber just to accomodate the streaming algorithms, it’s liberating to go on such a weird trip with a show and literally have no idea what’s going to happen next. That is so valuable, and we need more of it.

My favorite episode of the season is called “New Jazz,” and that phrase could metaphorically describe what Glover is up to here.

When Atlanta debuted in 2016, Glover said, “I just always wanted to make Twin Peaks with rappers.” Now, more than ever, he’s living up to that promise, with the kind of obtuse playfulness and restless experimentation, shot through with the truly disturbing, that defines the Lynchian style. I don’t think it’s fair to complain about that now when this is what we signed up for.

Watching this season of Atlanta, I kept thinking about Twin Peaks: The Return. The drifting narratives, the standalone episodes that may or may not connect to the main storyline, the freewheeling mix of dreams and hallucinations and reality, the pacing that seems designed to madden as much as build suspense, the long slow buildup to… what, exactly?

But also the exquisite moments of beauty and terror. The feeling that you’re seeing something that, however much it exasperates at times, isn’t like anything else on TV.

Twin Peaks is not the only classic freakfest Glover is influenced by here. The four anthology episodes as well as the disconnected prologue are very much in the tradition of The Twilight Zone. The suggestion, at the end of the first episode, that the anthology eps are something that Earn is dreaming makes them even more eerie.

I won’t try to argue that season 3 represents Glover at his best. I’ve spent paragraphs defending his approach, but I have to admit it lost me at times too. At times it almost seems deliberately off-putting, as if testing the audience is more important than cohesion. There’s no question the first two seasons had a bit more focus and were more powerful as a result; and there’s nothing on the level of “Teddy Perkins” here.

I’ve argued that the whole point of the series is frustration; but the episode about Al’s lost phone is so extremely frustrating that I cursed out loud at the end. Bad things happen to good people (especially when they’re Black), life is filled with futility, true enough; but that’s not always the vibe you want from a series at the end of a long day.

Al wants the phone back especially because he recorded some ideas for new rhymes on it; as he reveals in a moving monologue that brilliantly contrasts with his usual laconic nature (let me just repeat how fucking great Henry is in the role), he desperately needs it to get out of the creative block he’s suffering on tour. So the nagging, impotent feeling of never getting to hear his music is foregrounded more than usual in this episode — and dammit it’s almost painful to watch.

The stunt casting of problematic figures like Chet Hanks and Liam Neeson might leave you wondering if Glover sees himself as some kind of meme lord, stirring shit rather than actually commenting on anything. Playing himself in a cameo within a hallucinatory dream of Al’s, Neeson gleefully satirizes his own racist history. His parting shot, “The best and worst part about being white is you don’t have to learn anything if you don’t want to,” is, in context of reality, seriously confounding and uncomfortable.

Alexander Skarsgård also appears as himself, and also satirizes himself in a way that’s really wild, and ultimately gruesome. It’s hilarious, if not quite as disturbing.

Whenever I got puzzled or annoyed with this season, I tried to remember some of the episodes from the second season of Twin Peaks that seemed so silly and pointless (the talent show!). Just about any David Lynch creation, however great, has its share of aimless, chaotic, almost arbitrary moments that not only don’t fit any conventional story logic, but also disrupt the mood that Lynch himself has created. Much as I loved it, Twin Peaks: The Return is for long stretches made up of nothing but this aimlessness and chaos, like it was deliberately designed to tax our patience and drive away casual viewers. With Lynch, that’s just part of the transaction.

As with Lynch, I’d rather watch Glover’s messy experimentation than just about anything else on TV.

At times the more outrageous or pranksterish elements of Atlanta season 3 work together with the politics, and this produces some of its most compelling moments. The anthology episode about reparations, “The Big Payback,” plays like a Black Mirror version of racial justice. After some unnamed social turning point, presumably in the near future (but this could also be a dream), white individuals who are descended from slaveowners are legally allowed to be singled out and targeted for punitive, bankrupting expropriation. This impoverishes them and thrusts them into the ranks of the working class, while enabling the creation of a new Black bourgeoisie.

The episode plays almost like a PSA; there’s no real suspense or conflict other than observing the undoing of the hapless white protagonist, Marshall (Justin Bartha), a caricature of a middle-class white-collar worker who always assumed he was a good person and not a racist, but in reality has lived in denial. In short order he goes from being approached and publicly humiliated by his accuser Shaniqua (Melissa Lola Youngblood), a Black woman descended from slaves owned by his ancestor, to losing his house, his job and joint custody of his daughter, who is now ashamed of him.

In one of the most wrenching moments of the season, Marshall meets another white man whose wealth has been expropriated. The man gives a tearful monologue about why reparations are a good thing for everyone and it’s all going to be okay. It’s an unexpectedly moving meditation on reconciliation. Then… he blows his brains out.

(This character, played by Tobias Segal, is named Earnest, and is apparently meant to be some kind of dream version of Earn as a white man. It turns out he is also the white man in the boat in the season prologue, and he also appears in a mysterious photo received by Earn in a post-credits scene at the very end of the season. All of these enigmatic threads makes this scene even more unsettling.)

It’s brilliantly provocative, and I was duly provoked, but not because I have a problem with reparations overall. As much as any kind of reparations would be welcome, the kind of individual-level solution depicted in “The Big Payback” doesn’t address the systemic causes of racial oppression. It elevates some Black people to the bourgeois class, while leaving the system intact and thus assuring that inequality, exploitation and even racism will continue for the majority.

A lengthy discussion of reparations is outside the scope of this article, but I’ll point you to this excellent commentary by socialists Khury Petersen-Smith and brian bean. They argue that socialists should indeed explicitly support reparations for slavery. We should not simply assume, as some social democrats like Bernie Sanders do, that redistributing wealth to all workers via higher wages or more social welfare — as much as we also need those things — will make enough difference to overcome the lasting material impact of slavery on Black Americans. They call for broad action against the capitalist class: “a massive expropriation of wealth from the corporations, banks and insurance companies that profited handsomely from the slave trade and its aftereffects.” So we need a collective and multicultural movement to overthrow this racist system and build a new one, not a focus on individual guilt.

Petersen-Smith and bean go on to say that “the call for reparations presents an opportunity to win the whole working class… to unity against racism.” Similarly, in her commentary on reparations in Jacobin, Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor makes a powerful argument that the interests of the Black and white poor are inextricably bound, and that reparations will uplift everyone. “We all have a moral and material interest in uniting to create a different kind of society.”

But it’s important to remember that “The Big Payback” is satire — if it was an ardently sincere, gloopy, Aaron Sorkin-type depiction of some future reconciliation, it would be boring. The episode’s writer, Francesca Sloane, director Murai and Glover achieve a fine balance between the satirical aspects of the episode and a serious reckoning with the generational trauma and stolen wealth that are such a part of U.S. history. Despite my critique, I think it’s so smartly and even sensitively handled. I found myself thinking about the episode, and thinking about reparations, for a long time afterwards. Clearly that’s what was intended.

The simple fact is that the kind of revolutionary change that will allow for reparations is going to be a messy process any way you cut it. Picture all the white angst and anger over the George Floyd rebellion, times a million. There will be white people crying in their cars; there will be violence. This is what the episode is getting at and it’s spot-on.

The final shot of the episode, showing us a restaurant filled with wealthy Black customers being waited on by white workers, including Marshall, is searing. Regardless of how you think reparations should go, every viewer should question the material and ideological factors in our society that make this image sadly remarkable.

The next anthology episode, “Trini 2 De Bone,” also lampoons the white bourgeoisie, but with a somewhat more gentle tone. In it, a wealthy white couple (Justin Hagen and Christina Bennett Lind) who live an insular life in a Manhattan penthouse find out their Trinidadian nanny, Sylvia, has died. They soon come to realize both how little they knew her, and how close she was to their young son, Sebastian (Indy Sullivan Grudis). Under her influence the boy has learned to speak Trini creole — a great running joke — and loves spicy food and calypso. To help him come to terms with Sylvia’s death (a “teachable moment,” as the dad puts it with bland insensitivity), the family treks to her funeral in the Bronx, far outside their comfort zone, though Sebastian seems strangely at home. One of the best scenes in the season, the funeral swings wildly between grief, anger and a raucous celebration of Trini culture (I used to work with Trinis in New York, and this episode made me miss them).

Through it all there’s an underlying social critique, exploring the sacrifice of Black reproductive workers who give up time with their families in order to raise white people’s kids. The juxtaposition of this harsh reality with the tenderness Sebastian and Sylvia felt for each other is melancholy and haunting. Literally haunting, since there’s a vague indication that supernatural forces are at work — though I couldn’t work it out myself, and it may be just too vague for many viewers.

As with Marshall, the portrayal of Sebastian’s parents is mostly caricature; all they are is uptight, shallow, emotionally distant with their child, and comically taken aback by the exuberance and realness of the Trinidadians. I don’t mind the flatness of this portrayal; I’ve always enjoyed caricatured or villainous white characters in films by nonwhite filmmakers (examples: the evil British soldiers in Ip Man and the Bollywood historical drama Mangal Pandey: The Rising; or the white American VIPs in Squid Game). It’s enlightening and just funny to see how others see us.

On the other hand, to be honest, in my experiences with rich white Manhattanites I’ve found they’re often really that uptight and shallow.

In general it’s interesting how much of this Black-produced series focuses on white people — our foibles, our lack of awareness (from the prologue: “The thing about being white is it blinds you”). Very often, it’s about white malice too. Throughout the season, white characters lie to, steal from, cheat and exploit the Black protagonists. In the first episode, “Three Slaps,” a white couple abuses the Black children they’ve adopted, and ultimately try to kill them (this is based on a horrifying true story from 2018).

Aside from the headlines, this depiction of a sinister white threat owes an obvious debt to Get Out (and to be fair, Atlanta was making references to Get Out as early as season 2 in 2018). I think that’s a good thing. Six years after its release, the growing legacy of Get Out has resulted in the creation of a new set of tropes in Black cinema, but they are very effective tropes that continue to say a lot about our racist society.

The creators seem to want to provoke their Black audience too. In “White Fashion,” Al gets roped into an NGO made up of Black celebrities who are hired out by corporations for publicity, as token representation to assuage white guilt. A veteran member of the group (Fisayo Akinade) tells him, “I haven’t paid for a meal in 73 police shootings.” It’s a biting parody of both white hand-wringing and Black liberalism.

In “Rich Wigga, Poor Wigga,” another anthology episode, Aaron (Tyriq Withers), a mixed-race high schooler who’s always identified with his white heritage, tries to prove he’s Black enough for a college scholarship offered only to Black students. The story takes no prisoners in its cutting commentary on code-switching, colorism and internalized racism. It’s also hilarious, and one of the best episodes of the season. Shot in gorgeous black and white, it has the feel of a psychological thriller, but it makes time for a satire of first-person shooter videogames, as Aaron takes out his frustration by trying to burn down his school with a flamethrower. It ends on a jarringly comic note: Aaron flirting with his white ex-girlfriend and smirking at the camera while the breezy 80s R&B jam “Hangin’ on a String” by Loose Ends plays on the soundtrack — as if it’s suddenly a Black John Hughes film. Honestly, the cheekiness of that made my day (and the tune stayed in my head for weeks).

There are so many other things to celebrate about this season; no way could I get to everything. I loved all the subtle jokes and cultural references and Easter eggs (those I could catch anyway). One of the unhinged white adoptive parents in the first episode dismisses her concerned neighbor as “one of those Bernie Bros”; and their dog is named CornPop. In the last episode, the real-but-not-real Skarsgård bitterly complains about Van’s sadistic “game” of planting drugs on him and outing him to the media: “This may cost me the Baby Shark movie!” The assisted-suicide ceremony for Tupac Shakur (that detail alone!) crashed by Van and Darius in Amsterdam is a clever allusion to Midsommar — the morbid creepiness of the proceedings, the attendees clad in white garb, the floral arrangements, and the implied racism and communal violence of the neopagan cult.

I’ve talked about the weirdness and the politics, but what really makes this series is its humanity. Juxtaposed against all the surrealism, the moments of vulnerability shown by the four leads on their foreign trip are that much more resonant — their fatigue and anxiety, their joy and wonder. The scene at the end of the seriously disturbing last episode in which Van pours out her heart to her friend Candice about why she felt the need to escape her life and flee to Europe is so touching after all the madness that’s gone on. So is the exhausted disenchantment and anger shown by the normally aloof and spacey Darius when a white colleague in London horrendously wrongs a fellow Nigerian.

In the stellar eighth episode, “New Jazz,” Al goes down a rabbit hole in his mind into a profound, dreamlike hallucination under the influence of some very powerful edibles from an Amsterdam café (recommended by Darius, of course). Among other adventures on this vision quest, Al is chased by a strangely threatening gang of white fans, has a drink with Neeson at a venue called the Cancel Club, and falls in with a charismatic Black trans woman named Lorraine (Ava Gray) who doles out lots of unwanted life advice. At the end of the episode, after Al recovers, there’s a quiet bit of dialogue with Earn about the ownership of his music masters that feels like the heart of the entire season. As if it was all leading up to this moment of reassurance. It’s subtle but lovely.

Early on in the episode, after they eat the space cakes and before they lose each other in the Red Light District, Darius recommends that Al listen to Stereolab in his headphones to facilitate his trip.

Thus we’re treated to a scene of a stoned Al walking around the streets of Amsterdam soundtracked by the lush, gorgeous, jazzy, trippy “The Flower Called Nowhere,” from the 1997 classic Dots and Loops. (Yes, Stereolab has a significant but underrated Black following. Prominent among their fans are Questlove, who says J. Dilla put him onto them and who has collaborated with Latitia Sadier; and Pharrell, who apparently has said that Dots and Loops is his favorite album to have sex to.)

I can’t tell you how happy this made me; it’s a small thing but something about it crystallized my admiration of season 3 once and for all. Everyone’s talking about Kate Bush in Stranger Things but this is the TV soundtrack moment that’s hit me hardest this year. Stereolab are one of the bands closest to my heart, one of my favorite things in life, and I don’t believe I’d ever heard their music in a film or a series before. That it turns out to be Atlanta that gave them play is so perfect, and just affirms why I love this show so much — even when it’s not at its best.

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