4.5/5 Stars
Donald Glover (“Spider-Man: Homecoming”) is a media personality who has taken the world by storm over the last couple years. Getting his start as a writer on Tina Fey’s hit show “30 Rock” at age 28, the actor/director/writer/producer/hip-hop artist has gone on to make three different studio albums under his rap name “Childish Gambino.” He wormed his way into the hearts of TV viewing audiences as a mainstay of Dan Harmon’s ensemble college comedy “Community” as nerdish jock Troy Barnes and introduced himself to blockbuster audiences by appearing in a tiny part in “Spider-Man: Homecoming.” He will also go on to voice Simba in Jon Favreau’s live action reboot of “The Lion King” as well as portray a younger version of Lando Calrissian in “Solo: A Star Wars Story.” A big contributor to his success, however, is the critical and commercial FX comedy hit, “Atlanta,” which premiered in fall 2016.
Created and executively produced by Glover and his brother Stephen, Glover stars in the show as Earnest “Earn” Marks, a Harvard dropout, who is broke, homeless and jobless and discovers that his cousin Alfred (Brian Tyree Henry, “This is Us”) is an up-and-coming rapper and hip-hop artist in the city of Atlanta. After successfully managing to become Alfred’s manager, the 10-episode first season followed Earn and Alfred’s many misadventures, along with supporting players Darius (LaKeith Stanfield, “Get Out”), Alfred’s right-hand man and self-proclaimed “guru,” and Van (Zazie Beetz, “Geostorm”), Earn’s ex-girlfriend and mother of his child.
After over a year of uncertainty of when and if the second season was even coming, FX released a promo with the start of the new year, stating that the show would indeed be returning with a new subtitle “Robbin’ Season,” referring to the period in Atlanta at Christmas when the crime rates increase exponentially. The pilot, “Alligator Man,” sees Earn, a year after his and Alfred’s initial success, attempting to move back in with Alfred after he is kicked out of the warehouse where he has been living, only to discover that Alfred, despite being under house arrest, does not need his managerial skills as much now due to him having received a lot more attention from fans and studios alike. Alfred sends Earn and Darius on an errand to deal with Alfred’s father and Earn’s uncle William (Katt Williams, “Great America”), and of course, like everything else established on the show up to this point, the episode does an amazing job with balancing the tense and depressing living situations that people find themselves in with areas like Atlanta with amazing bits of levity that never feel forced.
The thing that made “Atlanta” as good as it was the first time around was Glover’s spectacular ability to simply tell a story about an area where people live and just make everything seem so much more ludicrous than one would think, while never once making the audience feel as though they are being tricked or duped. Every single absurdist thing they are able to play around with helps to craft this brilliant and amazingly unique identity that is continued by this first episode of the new season. Despite there being not much to talk about storywise for this episode, Glover has gone on to state that this season will follow a much more coherent storyline than the first season and to expect all sorts of new insanity along the way. If this premiere has shown anything, it is that the show has lost none of the charm and brilliance that made it as great as it was and shows no signs of stopping either.
Image from FX Networks via YouTube.com
