A review of the third season of "Atlanta," TV's most surreal comedy series
After a four-year hiatus with its penultimate season, one of the best shows of the past decade is back.
The second season of "Atlanta," which ended back in the distant pre-pandemic year of 2018, sent the characters on a European tour. Here they are, from left to right: rising hip-hop artist Al Banchil/Paper Boi (Brian Tyree Henry), his ever-quiet friend Darius (Lakit Stanfield), manager and cousin Ern (Donald Glover), and Van (Zazie Beatz), the latter's ex-girlfriend. In the new episodes, the quartet of road-trippers are fully acquainted with the mysterious European culture, as well as try to organize a concert in Amsterdam and go to sleepovers for billionaires in London.
To be honest, I was a little apprehensive about the third and fourth seasons of Atlanta. After a four-year hiatus, the show was returning to a markedly changed world, and there were plenty of reasons to be concerned: from the fact that the audacious comedy had come under the wing of a risk-averse Disney, to the fact that so many brilliant shows had come out in the meantime that "Atlanta" could simply lose its experimental exceptionalism in the general background. Plus, after 2020, which was remembered for, among other things, protests against institutional racism and police brutality, there have been many creative reflections on the lives of African-American people. The latter has always been the foundation of "Atlanta," the series being primarily a treasure trove of vignettes about how sometimes uncomfortable and absurd it is to be black in contemporary America: salesmen questioning the originality of banknotes and nagging to call the police, whites quoting Malcolm X to his face, and so on. Again, it seemed that the project might not come back as witty and topical, simply because there was so much more competition-not least because of the advent of TickTock.
The only one who did not doubt the success of the sequel was one of the creators of "Atlanta" Donald Glover: the artist first compared the new series to Kanye West's album Graduation (because the episodes will be just as accessible and enjoyable), and later called the third and fourth seasons the greatest in the history of television - with a note that the show will be on the level of "The Sopranos". After three new episodes, we can say that the first comparison seems more apt: not a masterpiece yet, but definitely an exemplary "Atlanta" that can quietly captivate both new viewers in particular and the general audience in general. The good news is that the series has not become sillier or simpler - on the contrary, the third season looks like a spiritual successor to the best and most unusual episode, the horror interlude "Teddy Perkins" about childhood trauma and the price of fame.
The familiar "Atlanta" does not return immediately. The first episode is a kind of digression, dealing with the odyssey of a black schoolboy who is removed from his home by social services and sent to a family of women who seem to collect foster children. Jokes about woke culture, white feminism, and disgusting organic food are pretty quickly replaced by a reimagining of a real tragedy - in 2018, two similar foster mothers committed family suicide, taking their six children with them. Again, this is how exemplary "Atlanta" looks - not only are the creators not afraid to criticize controversial topics, but they choose a radical form to speak out. In the following episodes, familiar characters appear in the frame, but the feeling of existential anxiety and worry set by the previous episode does not go anywhere, although the authors return to the comedic tone, hilariously ridiculing the blackface and the concept of a white savior. This dissonance is one of the minor but still flawed aspects of the new series: there is more surrealism than absurdity, and deadpan comedy has almost completely replaced easy gags and jokes.
Even if Glover's comments that viewers are in for a rare masterpiece fall short, "Atlanta" will still go down in history as one of the premier series of the 21st century. It is a modern and timely satire that, through mockery and creative experimentation, does far more to create a progressive society than the endless moralizing articles that have taken over the American press. Empathy for the characters during their absurd confrontations with racists and not-so-smart justice activists reveals the country's social problems far more vividly than another unsubstantiated piece about why the U.S. is bad. The viewer is no fool: he can come up with a cautionary conclusion on his own if he wants to.
This article was sponsored by Ed Ammerlaan
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