How Atlanta ushered in a new era of non-traditional, non-white TV
Donald Glover’s about-to-end “Twin Peaks with rappers” opened the door for more experimental series centered on underrepresented groups
TV Features Atlanta
The fall of 2016 will go down in history as the dawn of a Black TV renaissance. Queen Sugar brought an Ava DuVernay-led production that would give opportunities to dozens of first-time female directors. Insecure ushered in the prestige Black sitcom, introducing eventual mogul Issa Rae and opening the door a bit wider for other internet creators like Quinta Brunson to get their chance on primetime. Meanwhile, on FX, Donald Glover accomplished a near-indescribable feat. Though he gave us the memorable “Twin Peaks with rappers” tagline, the show took the image of the rapper in pop culture (along with several others, including the drug dealer and the broke boy) and elevated it from a common stereotype to a full, nuanced character.
None of the four beloved main characters on Atlanta, which airs its series finale on November 10, is just one thing, though they could have been minimized into singular tropes. Sardonic rapper Paper Boi (Brian Tyree Henry), his college dropout cousin/manager Earn (Donald Glover), their psychedelic friend Darius (LaKeith Stanfield), and Earn’s baby mama Van (Zazie Beetz) would likely have been diminished to tone-deaf jokes or special-episode surrogates in the previous golden age of Black TV, with shows like Living Single and Girlfriends focused on the descendants of the Talented Tenth. Instead, they’re given the same agency and nuanced eye that were turned towards families behaving badly or white male antiheroes. The characters could deal with topics like financial struggles, living with grief, and arrested development without getting shuffled into the industry death knell of “not having popular appeal.”
Atlanta would still be a great show with just its incisive social commentary and full-belly laughs, but then it took its loose “dramedy” categorization and blew it wide open, shifting between genres and formats episode to episode and even turning out stunning homages to other media. Season one’s “B.A.N.” is the episode that first showed the series’ capabilities, placing Paper Boi in a roundtable talk show complete with its own original ads. After that first dip, the show built its way up for season four’s stellar “The Goof Who Sat By The Door,” a revisionist-history mockumentary that has a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it connection to the city itself. These episodes have captivated audiences with their storytelling capabilities and helped others realize that diverse shows can accomplish anything they want (something fans of these series already knew).
Hollywood makes new moves based on previous successes. Once Atlanta won its first few Emmys, decision-makers glommed onto the truth that uncategorizable shows can be successful. Now there are several more beloved series that treat other underrepresented groups with the same nuance and care, while letting them escape the mold of sitcom, soap, and prestige-drama formats and make something entirely new.
When Reservation Dogs premiered, it was praised for a lot of traits that made Atlanta’s first season so singular, including an incredibly strong sense of self from the very first episode. From the wild opening heist, it was clear that the show’s all-Native writing team and creators Taika Waititi and Sterlin Harjo were going to upset the usual stereotypes around Indigenous people. And throughout its first two seasons, the comedy has embraced absurdism and treated the systemic issues that Bear, Elora, Willie, and Cheese face with both empathy and humor. It doesn’t fit into the formula that Hollywood previously had for Indigenous characters, which often sunk into trauma porn.
Compare the week of Atlanta’s series finale to its series premiere, and there are so many great diverse shows that are empathetic and experimental. Ramy has been lauded for centering a Muslim family in New Jersey, with each member getting their own developed storylines. And then there’s Ramy actor and comedian Mo Amer, who created a Netflix show based on his own life that showed the red tape of a Houston family’s asylum claim. Meanwhile, Hulu’s This Fool details the hilarious day-to-day of a case manager for the recently incarcerated—one of them is his own cousin—and puts a fresh spin on the common character dilemmas of life stagnancy and codependency. Even shows that exist within traditional genres—like the network sitcom Abbott Elementary, the Disney+ superhero spectacle Ms. Marvel, and sketch shows like Sherman’s Showcase and A Black Lady Sketch Show—can bring intra-community nuances to the small screen.
With the success of Atlanta, its writing team and directors have contributed to the building of a television canon that actually reflects real life. Black people and people of color often get shuffled into the prescribed roles that mainstream society has built for them. TV can be the biggest perpetrator, boxing POC characters into specific molds that lack authenticity and even a basic empathy for those marginalized people. What we see onscreen seeps into our subconscious and affects the way we see each other and ourselves. Though Glover himself would probably say he just wanted to make his Black Twin Peaks, he and the award-winning Atlanta team also made a crack in those molds, encouraging other creators to bring their authentic selves to TV. That—along with the invisible cars and “Teddy Perkins”—will be its legacy.
38 Comments
All the seasons of Atlanta were FAR better than Twin Peaks season 2. Season 3 fell off a bit but it had the Nepalese Space Cakes episode at least.
Season 2 was sporadic at best but the scene where Maddy (spoiler?) dies and the finale are some of the best TV of the 90s.
There was some good stuff but it was FAR outweighed by the bad, soap opera garbage.Thank god Season 3 was one of the best seasons of television ever.
For Lynch fans, 100%.
“It is happening again…”
With how much season 3 was lauded at the time of its release, I’m surprised most of the retrospectives I’m seeing for Atlanta don’t really touch on it too much.It had some high points, but I definitely think season 4 is much better. While a lot of reviewers seemed to love the anthology style bottle episodes, I was definitely not invested as much any time the show veered away from the main cast.
I kinda feel the opposite. s4 has been great, but a little too safe for me – I wanted the show to get even wilder in its last season but instead it’s regressed back to s1 a bit, complete with a BAN sequel and all. plus Snipe Hunt and Alfred’s World were the only times it really hit emotionally as the best of this show (eg Woods) doesI feel confused every time I read that s3 was considered a fall off or whatever. it definitely wasn’t perfect, but I enjoyed it a lot at the time and saw a lot of people who were the same. Cancer Attack, New Jazz and Old Man/Tree are easily some of the show’s best stuff
It’s all a matter of what you like: I like the gang getting up to crazy/funny shit and am not too keen on the emotional episodes.
I love Season 3 of Atlanta… I think it’s reputation will grow in time. I loved all 4 seasons of the series and will miss it very much!
Well one thing about Atlanta is that episodes with Darius are always better than episodes without him, and the anthology style bottle episodes did not have him. Some of them worked, like the lesbians with the kids, and some of them didn’t, like the reparations episode. But none of them were as good as the episodes with the main cast, that’s for sure.
I agree on Darius for sure, and that’s my one issue with season 4. Not enough Darius. The opening of the episode where he’s trying to return an item to the store in the middle of a looting and gets chased by the lady in the power scooter is classic Atlanta. Wish there was more of that.My problem with most of the bottle episodes was the heavy-handedness of them. The reparations one in particular was extremely heavy-handed, taking a full length episode to deliver a message that White Earn’s character sums up perfectly in the last 30 seconds. There was kind of an “okay, we get it” vibe, at least for me. I liked the bottle episodes when they had a bit more fun with it (like Trini 2 de Bone, or Rich Wigga, Poor Wigga) rather than the ones that took most of the episode to repeatedly hammer home the same point (Big Payback, Three Slaps). The more “light-hearted” (for lack of a better term) bottle episodes still dealt with heavy topics and made serious points, but it was able to get the point across in a less beating-you-over-the-head way. But the season definitely shined more when it let the main cast play around in Europe.
And omg when Ern gives that whole speech about how Darius is better than kissing for a pair of shoes and he knows it, then he comes back with ‘I think we should do it’ was goddamn hilarious.I honestly thought the reparations one kind of twisted the message in the end: The white dude was working a job where he didn’t actually have to pay the reparations and the black people had become the bourgeois assholes. In the end they traded economic status but it didn’t seem like the government had really changed, so they’ll all still get screwed by The Man. I am not sure if we’re actually meant to view that through a Marxist lens but it’s honestly awesome that the show can even be interpreted that way.
“But the season definitely shined more when it let the main cast play around in Europe.”Yeah this. Great actors playing characters that we like are simply more entertaining.
I had forgotten about the shoes. The Crank That Killer is probably one of my favorite episodes of the whole series, it had me consistently laughing the entire time. Darius has been criminally underutilized this season, but when he’s on screen he’s better than ever.
I’m with you there, a top 10 episode at least if not top 5. Once this season finishes I want to rewatch the whole series, haven’t seen season 1 in way too long.Yep, every time he’s been on screen this season has been gold.
Definitely, I haven’t seen either of the first two seasons since I watched them the first time, feels like forever ago.
I rewatched the first season before the second came out but I haven’t seen either of them since. Counting Covid time, it feels like about 7 years lol
I’ve noticed it’s become a trend with what in retrospect, might be inflated reviews, these days. Critics praising weak seasons in the moment has become more and more common, even as viewers are saying in real time that something isn’t quite right.
Yeah I could see that. I didn’t hate the third season, but the way everyone was fawning over what, to me, were the weakest points in the season seemed odd. Especially now since that same crowd of reviewers seems to largely be ignoring that same time period of the show.
I don’t know, I definitely saw some grumbling from the reviews for season 3. The meracritic score was lower, the grades from this site for the later anthology episodes aren’t great, and the wikipedia entries for the reviews for specific episodes suggest a pretty mixed response.
Soooooooooo brave
Sooooo brave.
Sooooooo brave. And this definitely isn’t a cookie cutter piece that’s been written *literally* 1000 times. The bravery is off the charts
Sooooo brave. And original too. No one’s ever written a piece like this.
Sooooooo brave. And this article *definitely* hasn’t been written hundreds of times before by untalented hacks who have a deadline and no actual ideas.
I guarantee you’ve not watched a single episode of Atlanta.
I have. It’s a good show. It’s this article that’s dogshit.
I apologize for the assumption then, but it’s impossible to take anyone seriously who begins a comment with “Sooooo brave”.
Ok.
SOOoOOooO Brave.
are you autistic?
SOOOOoOooOoOOoO brave.
Yeah I thought so.
great
How long has it been that we’ve had the fabled 500-channel TV cornucopia which should have allowed room for every minority expression or representation under the sun – and it’s only within the past few years that we’ve actually allowed minority programming that doesn’t originate via the formulistic white male gaze. Maybe by rights we should be including Shondaland in with this, but still….I just hate the way we in this country keep giving ourselves congratulatory pats on the back about “how far we’ve come” when there is obviously still such a long way to go.
Shout out to Akwafina’s unique show as well. I liked it anyways.
Cant wait for this show to END.
The fall of 2016 will go down in history as the dawn of a Black TV renaissance.I chose to believe this statement is about Pitch. Gone too soon *sniff.* Luke Cage had its fans too, and months before This is Us, Sterling K Brown had emerged as a star along with Courtney B Vance thanks to The People vs. OJ Simpson earlier that year. And the summer gave us Underground, The Get Down, and the Roots remake (with Regé-Jean Page as Chicken George!) all of which were underrated. It was hard for those to get out of the shadow of new hits like Westoworld, The Good Place, and that spooky Netflix show with the kids in the 80s. Plus, The Americans were in their best season, and we got “The Battle of the Bastards.” What a year.Anyway, as much as I love Atlanta, its popularity still feels under the surface to me, and (hot take) I’d credit shows like Black-ish or Empire for making more of a modern cultural splash before Atlanta. Tracing a line from Atlanta to series like Ms Marvel or Abbott Elementary seems like a reach. I think Atlanta’s influence has mainly just been in-house on FX and Hulu, really. And that’s normal for networks when something hits.
The Rez Dogs comparison is 100% on the mark. Bear is its Earn, Willie Jack is a distaff Alf, Elora Danan is the Van, Cheese is the Darius. Breaks from reality, white people are (often) horrible, the honest and genuine depictions community’s language and everyday norms…it’s there.