Atlanta

Opening a new season with such a narrative non-sequitur would be a bold move for any other show, but here it makes perfect sense. This is television as likely to take inspiration from internet memes and 90s kids cartoons as from a Palme d’Or-winner’s canon.

It goes without saying that it is a show with a strong flavour and it won’t be for everyone, but Atlanta is a true great of the form, making other comedy-dramas feel like the toy you get inside a Kinder Egg. Atlanta is the Great American Novel trapped inside a flatscreen TV.

The first two episodes of season three cement Atlanta’s reputation as a classic-in-progress and one of the most daring and imaginative shows on television, period.

The show traveled past the point of cementing its assured artistry in its second season. When it announces it is upping the ante, we can trust it knows what it's doing. These two episodes back up this assumption, both through the premiere's side trip from the main storyline and the gang's travels into an unknown place where they're considered as both foreign and other.

The endlessly clever series wastes no time in re-asserting its dominance as one of the boldest shows on television.

[The first episode is] a standalone episode chilling enough to rival season 2 highlight “Teddy Perkins,” in which the series’ increasingly illustrious cast is all but absent. ... Unsparing is, among others, the right word to describe these two conjoined episodes, if not the show as a whole. It justifies the persistence of Atlanta, an entire ocean away from Atlanta.

The two-episode Season 3 premiere, airing Thursday, is “Atlanta” in top form, going to new places while maintaining that unsettling sense of never knowing how the ground might shift. ... Spectacular and haunting first episode. ... The two episodes sent to critics for review are a mere peek, but they give no sign of the show’s having lost a step in the past four years.

FX is going with two episodes for the long-awaited season premiere night, and they somehow have even less in common tonally than “Barbershop” and “Teddy Perkins” did, while being alternately as ridiculous and chilling as the most memorable moments of each of those.

The Donald Glover-created series, returning for Season 3, remains as ethereal and shocking and fascinating as ever; having screened the first two installments, it’s a thrill to know that eight more are coming to engage and confound us.

The premiere episode’s powerful assuredness, as well as the deep concern with looking uncomfortably hard and finding the grim comedy and the outlandish sorrow within American life, is precisely that which that makes this show, once again, great.

Even though we know to expect the unexpected from Atlanta, the series still remains one of the indefinable and unique shows ever made, a shock to the television landscape that is unlike anything else. Atlanta has always been great, but with these first two episodes of Season 3, it continues its path of becoming one of the all-time greats.

Threading in these many varied parts and themes into what is, once again, one of TV’s most intriguing pieces of performance art. But it’s also saying something in an artful way; this is not TV vegetables, there aren’t lessons to be learned exactly. There are thoughtful impressions, strange occurrences, exceptional happenstance. In many ways, Atlanta is creating its own folklore.

It's a relief to report that creator Donald Glover and his collaborators have not lost their capacity for vital tone-clashing comedy. There are laugh-out-loud moments right alongside skin-crawling bits of social awkwardness, plus some outright shocks. Everything has changed, but Atlanta minus Atlanta is still Atlanta.

Atlanta is back, and with it, our rapt attention.

It may have taken four years for Atlanta to come back, but it’s lost none of its daring in the interim. We do prefer the episodes where Earn and crew are all together, but we’re looking forward to seeing where Glover and company take their storytelling this season.

No other show on TV is doing the thing that Atlanta does, with its doses of humor, surrealism, horror, travelogue and hip-hop as genre-blending starting points for an uncomfortable exploration of racial identity in America. Even shows that have justifiably evoked comparisons to Atlanta — remarkable FX sibling Reservation Dogs comes to mind — represent more the potential to be the next Atlanta than occupying a place of actual peerage.

The new episodes live up to the ones that came before, although only two were made available for review. Both run the gamut of what "Atlanta" can be: Bold, experimental, and allegorical; comedic and astute examinations of the mundanities and oddities of Black life. They remain singular, exceptional and thought-provoking in the way only "Atlanta" episodes can be.

It would take a potent, sinister spell for “Atlanta” not to return as itself. In this season, even when the series aims for discomfort, a blatant disregard to be defined except on its own terms makes for a knowing calm.

Atlanta remains one of TV's most distinctive shows, if not the most distinctive, artistically ambitious show of its era. It's hilarious, disturbing, sad, and silly all at once, and is unafraid to challenge its audience. It's intelligently confrontational humor that forces white viewers to consider what they're laughing at. Unless it somehow falls off a cliff in quality after the first two episodes, Atlanta Season 3 keeps the show's streak of being one of the best shows on TV alive.

Far from a whimsical travelogue, this season of Atlanta has an off-kilter vibe that rattles your nerves. [28 Mar - 10 Apr 2022, p.7]

Sharp and accurate, at the same time, humorous, it is this latter characteristic that allows for the messages of the series to come through loud and clear. We’re listening and cannot wait to hear what the rest of this season has to say.

Not quite on the level of last season's best, like "Woods," "FUBU" or "Teddy Perkins," these openers are nonetheless pure, unfiltered "Atlanta." Take that as the praise intended.