Atlanta is back and taking bigger swings than ever before

Donald Glover’s unique comedy drama returns with biting commentary and unsettling horror, defying genre and upending expectations

The long anticipated third season of Atlanta begins with a lesson on whiteness. In the premiere, Three Slaps, a white man tells his Black companion that the remnants of an all-Black city, flooded by the government, lies beneath the lake where they are fishing so late at night. Barely a glimmer of skepticism crosses the Black man’s face; such horror falls quite believably within the realm of possibility (this lake is almost certainly based on Lake Lanier in Georgia, to say nothing of countless other razed Black enclaves across the country). “The thing about being white is it blinds you,” the white man muses, before he turns to the camera with his eyes sealed shut.

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Atlanta boasts some of the most sophisticated storytelling in recent years, a genre-defying venture to trace the intricacies of its particularly compelling characters and inevitably Black life. The show’s individuality coalesces under the sleek vision of its heavyweight creative team: namely, creator and star Donald Glover, his screenwriter brother Stephen Glover, director Hiro Murai and executive producer Stefani Robinson (also behind FX’s What We Do in the Shadows). The series so successfully evaded the “sophomore slump” that its lengthy hiatus – initially to accommodate the meteoric rise of its cast (a superhero film for Brian Tyree Henry, two for Zazie Beetz, and an Oscar nomination for LaKeith Stanfield) – was met, understandably, with a widespread groan. The premiere marks a triumphant, if somewhat unusual return: the principal characters – Al, the rapper better known as Paper Boi (Henry), his manager-cousin Earn (Glover), Al’s best friend Darius (Stanfield), and Earn’s ex-girlfriend Van (Beetz), with whom he shares a toddler – are largely absent. But the episode remains true to the show’s fundamental architecture: a series of oneiric forays into the surreal.

Whiteness as blindness has the ring of a certain Du Boisian concept, which, put crudely, argues that if Black people are preternaturally perceptive – necessarily so, for survival reasons – then white people are woefully, dangerously myopic. But this is only the prologue (admittedly a better horror film than the bulk on offer of late). The episode centrally pivots around middle-schooler Loquareeous (Christopher Farrar). In a mischievous outburst, he jumps up on his desk and starts dancing in class. His mother and grandfather are summoned by school administrators, and their abrasive response – including the grandfather’s eponymous three slaps – alarms the white guidance counselor, a villain merely blind to her own noxious condescension. She interrupts the Black female principal, suggests that Loquareeous be placed in remedial classes, and finally, the tragic coup de gras: makes good on her promise to have the child removed from his home.

Social services place Loquareeous with a hippie white lesbian couple, Amber (Laura Dreyfuss) and Gayle (Jamie Neumann), who already have three Black foster kids and immediately rename him “Larry”. They torment the children, feeding them raw chicken and avocado – when they feed them at all – and forcing them to sing field songs while they toil in the garden. It might strike as some kind of hyperbolic modern fable were it not so squarely based on blood-chilling true events, here given an antidotal rewrite, right before Earn, lying in bed, sleepily opens his eyes, seemingly to establish all that preceded a dream.

The shot becomes rather illustrative of what yokes this episode to the second Sinterklaas is Coming to Town (if not the implicit project of the series altogether): reframing the world through the weary lens of its Black characters recasts – on those occasions they must directly confront it – “white culture” as exotic and frequently grotesque. In the episode, we finally reunite with the foursome in Amsterdam where Al is preparing for a concert; only it’s December, the season of Sinterklaas and his helper Zwarte Piet, popularly depicted in blackface. The tradition emerges in tension with the otherwise friendly and polite interactions Earn and Al in particular have with Dutch people. Meanwhile, Van and a very high Darius end up on an excursion to a mysterious residence where they witness the presumably assisted death of a Black man, whom Darius speculates may actually be Tupac. In a sea of tranquil, largely white mourners, Van and Darius exchange horrified glances as they man suffocates.

Later, Al refuses to perform to a concert full of Dutch people in blackface, much to the unhinged ire of the white event organizer. It does give rise to one of the episode’s best lines as delivered by Henry: “Turn the clogs around, bruh. We ain’t doing this shit.” (Closely tied with, at least nominally, his late night text to Earn: “I need 300 pieces of fried chicken. All legs.”)

Sinterklaas will naturally garner comparisons to last season’s Helen where Van dragged a reluctant Earn to predominantly white Fasnacht celebrations. But we have been primed for a consideration on the politics of looking. Indeed, the origin of Loquareeous’s troubles was the instinctive understanding that he might in some way be rewarded for turning himself into a racialized spectacle; harmless or not, it certainly underpins what his mother and grandfather fear so gravely. In that way, these episodes also gesture back to the much-discussed Teddy Perkins, where Darius happens upon the ghoulish Michael Jackson-esque figure wrought by devastating child abuse and alienating fame. It seems from Atlanta, the encounter with whiteness can be at best an absurd and eerie daydream, and at worst a nightmare.