2. ATLANTA: ROBBIN' SEASON (FX)
Sophomore slumps are real, and the first season of Atlanta was such a singular surprise that the second seemed destined to disappoint. Somehow it didn’t, getting if anything weirder and darker than the first. This is the preeminent auteur-driven, sad sitcom of the sort I have developed a healthy disdain for, but I don’t get fed up with it as I do those others. Which honestly confuses me. Last year, I posited that it was because it was simply funnier than most comedies that have more "important" things than on their mind than telling jokes. But as I think back on its second and perhaps even better season, it’s not the funny bits that stand out (although I do still recall having to pause to catch my breath after an ex-con’s musings about how Bojack Horseman plays with his sympathies, or the freeze-frame/smash cut payoff to the strip club episode).But while I’m not exactly reversing course on the comedy-should-be-funny hobby horse that crops up so frequently on Schwartzblogs, there is more that makes Atlanta stand out than that. On the surface, go-to director Hiro Munai simply makes it look way, way better than most shows (or feature films, for that matter), even as it remains tightly grounded in a world of unease and poverty and the endless well of frustrated reaction shots that Bryan Tyree Henry can evince. Then there is the genuine unpredictability that comes with the untethering from strict serialization and continuity, which is something of a double-edged sword. On the one hand, shows of its auteurist, semi-anthological ilk are entirely impossible to predict, but on the other, predictability is only really an issue for plot-driven offerings like Game Of Thrones or The Expanse, where speculating on the upcoming twists is half the fun. Calling something that has little-to-no plot to begin with “unpredictable” seems like damning it with faint technicalities.
So maybe “surprising” is a better term than “unpredictable”. Rather than going into each episode with specific expectations or fears for where a particular plotline will turn, I expect a loosely-connected spinoff featuring a familiar character or two. And I remain continually surprised by the directions in which it spins, which this year was increasingly in the direction of outright horror. The real unifying thread between the episodes that otherwise vary so widely in setting, character focus, length and tone, is the sense of anxiety (be it racial, economic, or otherwise) that hums throughout even the lighter parts of Robbin’ Season. This is most obvious in the instantly-iconic “Teddy Perkins”, which actually does boil over into actual scary-movie territory. But it was also there in the discordantly cheerful imagery and costuming of the Oktoberfest episode, in Alfred getting lost in the urban jungle and more literal woods at different points, in a flashback where the wrong tag on a shirt threatens to turn middle school into an inner-city version of The Crucible, right up to a blood-freezing realization in the finale that threatened to turn a difficult year for Earn into an out and out tragedy.
But perhaps the most significant difference between Atlanta and other auteur-driven "comedies" is that it makes subtly astute decisions to avoid the feeling of a vanity project, which is how they almost always smack to me. And I’ll admit that I was especially concerned about that after an extensive New Yorker profile in the lead up to the second season debut painted Glover as by turns bitter, paranoid and egomanaical in the face of the enormous success of the first season (on top of his various other universally-lauded artistic endeavors). For a show that is to such a degree about frustration, failure, and disappointment, it seemed all too plausible for him to lose touch with those realities, or to turn his own character into a put-upon, unappreciated saint of a genius that the world keeps cruelly stymying. That’s pretty much what I’d expect from anyone with the ego to match his talents.
But the season evinced none of that, to an extent that I occasionally wondered if any of that article was just him idly fucking with a writer that was all set to write about a secretive tortured genius anyway. It's hard to lobby accusations of vanity when so many episodes focused on Earn not actually being all that sharp or savvy about the business he is paid to navigate. Nor does the season go out of its way to establish him as an especially great father, or partner, or whatever other special virtue that most shows would be sure to reiterate in order to guard against the audience’s sympathies drifting away. On the contrary, it seemed to actively court the realignment of those sympathies with big, gruff Alfred and his creeping fear that loyalty to this cousin is squandering the potential his Big Break could have held for both of them. There’s probably even a reading to be made of how Alfred, being the famous face, is actually more of the stand-in for Donald Glover, who did give his own younger brother his first gig writing for Atlanta. If you bought into that, you could make the case the vanity element is just more obscured by casting trickery than if he had hired himself as a charming “fictionalized” rapper/comedian/Calrissian named Donald. But even if that were true rather than pulled directly out of my ass just now, it wouldn’t change just how well the trick works. That willingness to literally step into the shoes of a figure so much more hapless than the real man, to do the work of finding ways to believably live in the skin of someone so much less impressive than he actually is, that’s not really how vanity works. Or if it is, then this particular form is operating on such a higher level than most that maybe its right to be impressed with itself.
Watch It For: Zazie Beetz, who I somehow didn’t mention at all.
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