Atlanta is About Everything and Nothing

I take the time to reflect on the first season of Donald Glover’s new show. The wonderfully weird and hard to pin down TV masterpiece of 2016.

I want to get one thing off the table early. I’ve always found it weird writing about Atlanta and its subject matter. Admittedly, that level of discomfort is due, at least in some part, to the fact that I’m white. Then there comes a brief pause where I consider whether or not that was the point of the show. Donald Glover, quite vocally, stated that one of the main goals with Atlanta is to show white people that “they don’t know all there is to know about black people.” Which, you know, no shit, I always freely admitted to that. I would have liked to believe that while living in the multicultural city such as Toronto and having friends and acquaintances as culturally diverse as our population I was still a relative outside to all other cultures outside of my own (lower-middle class Eastern European immigrant just minding his own damn business). So maybe some of the stories told in Atlanta were not for me, maybe some of them didn’t hit quite as well as they did for other people, yet I still think the show is a milestone in television and it should be talked about.

So let us.

Over a season of 10 episodes, Atlanta didn’t need time to find it’s footing or purpose. It was rather apparent from the start. It didn’t need an overarching theme or a great catalyst in the end that the show built up towards. No crescendo. It faked us out a few times making us believe there may be one, an overarching theme of Paper Boi being suspected in criminal activity multiple times, but these turned out to be just your “shit happens” moments of the show that may seem bizarrely significant to us while commonplace to the cast of Atlanta.

At it’s core, the show is not funny. It depicts real struggle without patronizing aggression or some sort of grand reward at the end of it. It doesn’t try to paint it as a dramatic plight, but rather just as a way of living. When Earn launches into his monologue about broke people and how all they do is try not to be broke, its not out of some place of grand sorrow, it’s just what it is. Having been broke myself and having gone into stores with my phone calculator trying to figure out how many daily recommended servings of whatever is in one pack of Mr. Noodle, that is basically what it’s like. Just like that moment, at its most poignant Atlanta isn’t meant to be funny.

The humor that does come across isn’t staged or prepackaged with a designated laugh track to let you know it’s okay to let out a quick burst of emotion. As such, there were moments where I wanted to laugh but felt uncomfortable doing so due to the subject matter. I was watching the show alone in my living room and some moments made me distinctly uneasy. They spoke to experiences catalogued by my friends and relayed to me anecdotally. They were not my own and yet I had this weird insight into them.

We are all familiar with black culture. Rich white men have made a business out of distilling it, eliminating undesirable narratives and then monetizing it where convenient: music, sports, entertainment etc. They have developed a level of blackness the general population is comfortable with while eliminating any undesirable side-effects… you know like the other every day realities of life. With shows like Empire and Blackish we get to see that distilled version of it that’s still black but only black enough as to not make us think about all the other fucked up shit that comes with race relations in America.

Atlanta doesn’t toe that line. Its all black writing room is one of it’s strongest assets, ensuring that the stories portrayed on the show are representative of the experience lived by people every day. Yes, in many ways they are satirized but they recreate very real experiences very real people face every day, and that is the crux of this show.

It doesn’t need a grand finale or a grand revelation to make it enjoyable, entertaining and educational at the same time. It just needs to paint a vivid enough picture through small interactions between its characters, each just trying to get paid, because at the end of the day that’s what we’re all trying to do. Just like life it’s a little bit funny, a whole lot of sad and predominantly just “shit happens.” Atlanta manages to tell a big story without big set pieces. It doesn’t build up and exaggerate, it just portrays real people in real places.

For many of us, it is a window into a reality we thought we knew, but we really didn’t. And if you came into this experience more “woke” than everyone around you because “you have a black friend,” congratulations, here’s a cookie. The reality is, just like me, even if you know you don’t know, you know what I mean (like you’re my dude, but you’re not really my dude). We may have access to the culture, but we don’t live the life and we’ll never live the life, that’s just the reality to it. We don’t know everything and it’s presumptuous and if not downright disrespectful to assume that we do.

Atlanta’s genius is that it’s not trying to teach us anything, it’s just showing us what it is. The conclusions you come to from watching are entirely up to your own discretion.