Atlanta

Atlanta Season 2 is funny. The laughs are often as unexpected as they are uncomfortable, and the series delights in pushing you to the edge before dropping an unexpected punchline. ... But Atlanta’s oddness is its greatest strength. It’s a show that feels as hard-to-define as its characters; what seems easy to explain on the surface gets messy and complicated upon further examination.

[A] trippy, incisive comedy. ... The show always finds jokes in the bleakest of situations, like how the season opens with a chatty car ride turned armed robbery, featuring some truly expert tonal whiplash. But the moments in which Earn and his friends can just be themselves are casually, wonderfully funny in a way that highlights how much they have to hold themselves back just about everywhere else.

The end result is sort of like the Coen Brothers directed Get Out while listening to trap music, and it's not like anything I've ever seen.

Robbin’ Season was certainly worth the wait.

The long-awaited second season of Atlanta is as surreal and ingenious as the first. ... Atlanta is inarguably one of the best, most innovative shows currently being made.

Atlanta is art that announces itself as art, instead of, like so much TV, slinking into the gallery through the doorway marked “entertainment.” ... It is also simply elevated.

With its second season, Atlanta--subtitled “Robbin’ Season,” for the holiday season crime spree that engulfs the city--is even more atmospheric, with the measured confidence of an Olympic athlete. ... It shows us how easily “wrongdoing” slips under our skin and becomes a part of us. Few other shows are so capably transporting--not to a time or a city but a way of being, a way of living, that is only now being translated to screen.

Atlanta continues to be unlike anything else on television.

In the second season of the Emmy-winning comedy, he [Donald Glover] breaks even more rules, again with dazzling and deserved confidence. ... The performances are superb at every level, and the direction, mostly by Hiro Murai, is equal to the levels of excellence in the acting and the scripts by Glover, his brother Stephen and others.

It’s an excellent and deceptively precise show about the human condition.

There is essentially nothing like Atlanta on television. ... Atlanta remains fresh and surprising.

Be assured there’s still nothing else like it--on FX or anywhere else. Atlanta depicts “The Black Experience” without preachments, but with pride of authorship.

It is the same [as Season One]. And it is different. And that’s a wonderful, surreal, hilarious thing. ... Robbin’ Season is so good, it’s almost criminal.

The so-called Robbin’ Season has the characters confront stranger obstacles, and this gives the writers fresh opportunities to venture into places no other comedy on television can, or is brave enough to attempt. The tone in Atlanta flips from moment to moment without warning, and without alienating viewer. ... And there is a cartoonish craziness to these new episodes that can be mind-boggling even while incorporating honest commentary about the reality of living in today’s America.

What I find most remarkable about Atlanta is the tonal balance and the confidence, something Glover has always displayed as an artist. Earn Marks may not be that confident in his life, but it takes an amazingly assured creative voice to calibrate comedy, drama, and social satire to such perfect degrees on shows like this one. In just three episodes, there is a typical season’s worth of character, commentary, and humor. I can’t wait to see more.

Glover and friends seem to have hit on a new way to surprise the audience: by making Atlanta, at least for a while, into a more conventional TV show. The three episodes given to critics are by far the most consistent in terms of story and tone of any comparable stretch from season one. ... Atlanta can be great because you never expect what it might do next. But that’s far from the only reason it’s great, as the start of season two so potently demonstrates.

Robbin' Season is cloaked in a heavy yet strangely exhilarating veil of dread. ... Yet there are moments of wonder within the brutally and beautifully pragmatic Robbin' Season.

The ever-audacious comedy continues to surprise viewers in all sorts of unpredictable ways. As bold and daring as ever, producer-writer-star Donald Glover's cable series picks right up where the first season left off--fiercely funny and marvelously mercurial.

It’s clear that Glover knew what worked in Season 1, which already came out of the gate as a bold and confident series, and Season 2 is a continuation of that, bucking a trend of sophomore slumps for auteur-driven television shows. ... Each of the first three episodes reveals a robbery of some kind that all manage to be both funny and sad. It’s a balance Atlanta does especially well, and the series is again elevated by the style of director Hiro Murai, who truly creates his own world for these characters to inhabit.

Not only does it further Earn’s motivation in intriguing new ways, but it invites a broader understanding of his perspective. His problems are both his and so many others’. Brothers Donald and Stephen Glover, who penned the episodes, continue to find natural rhythms to convey the bigger picture.

Like any surreal entertainment, Atlanta is always in danger of becoming too precious, hitting that "Life Aquatic" phase where quirky style becomes empty weirdness. But after a long, awardsy break, the opening episodes of Robbin' Season let me thrilled, surprised, and scared.

Atlanta is the warped reflection that an absurd country deserves. ... Few shows are as good at building to dizzying heights of weirdness without clueing you in that anything out of the ordinary is happening. Fewer still have such an astute grasp of how mobile devices and internet connections have allowed everyone of every social class, race, and ethnicity to compulsively document their lives.

Patience is required by and rewarded in the three episodes screened for critics: Some stage-setting is necessary to illustrate changes in the characters lives, but it also fits with the moseying pace and under-the-influence tenor Glover and director Hiro Murai struck in the first season.

Glover has conceptualized Atlanta so that he can do with it whatever he wants; he’s not bound by traditional sitcom rules or limitations. That’s the fun of it. It’s his ride, and where he goes is anyone’s guess. But it will be worth the trip.

“This place, umm, has a vibe,” Earn says at one point. The same might be said about “Atlanta.” Once visited, it cannot be forgotten.

It's hard to know where any of this is headed, but Atlanta is still destination TV. [5 Mar - 18 Mar 2018, p.13]