Welcome to Atlanta, jacking hammers and vogues
We tend to praise TV shows and movies for portraying “real” moments. Instances where programming sheds it’s fictional veneer and flows into the real world. Unfortunately, the moment it gets a little to real we must pull the curtain back again and reformat. This leads to us insulating these occasions with fiction, interpretations of reality that are more comfortable to process. We’re able to deal with the violence of Empire as long as we get to bask in the extravagant hedonism that follows thereafter. We’re never meant to understand the Bronx from the perspective of “what’s it like to actually reside there” in the Get Down, we are just supposed to see how it is to get out. These shows tread lightly when they get within touching distance of reality, sprinkling it conservatively in their narrative. Atlanta on the other hand takes these instances and stretches them into a show.
The noise on the street (the cold, hard street that is the internet) is that Atlanta is not your typical Donald Glover experience, but then again, do we even know what that would be? The man has reinvented himself creatively enough times to fill the required quota for us to refer to him as a renaissance man and Atlanta may just be his greatest achievement.
The show doesn’t derive its emotional gravitas from prolonged moments that feel ultimately staged by the time they reach their destination. It sort of hangs in the air through the first two episodes around instances that don’t always feel connected to each other. It speaks with a real voice about real and complex issues, respecting all of its characters, big or small. There are real things here to unpack step by step.
Glover plays Earn Marks, a real life broke person (not real life as in non-fictional, but real life as in actually broke) selling Credit Card loyalty programs at the Airport. The show addresses this issue head on. This isn’t an instance of six twenty-somethings living in downtown New York and never struggling to pay rent despite their apartment probably having the street value of two Rolls Royce Phantoms. It meddles with this reality in the beginning and even when we get to the plot of Earn trying to manage the rap career of his cousin, Paper Boi (Brian Tyree Henry) things don’t change all that much.
Aside from having a nicer apartment (or an apartment as Earn is technically homeless), the reality is still the same. The single is hot in the streets, but most people still don’t know who Paper Boi is until Earn gets him on the radio (for a modest fee of $500 and cringe worthy interaction with a white friend who probably uses “I have a black friend” in conversation way more liberally than he should). Even then things don’t blow up, and instead boil down.
The motivations behind each character, but Earn and Paper Boi in particular are very modest, basic… primal. They’re just trying to get buy, doing what it is they do, navigating the world around them. The reality of Atlanta, a city with a very high black population as well as the state of music in Atlanta beyond the obvious heavy hitters is front and center. The show doesn’t rely on gloss to make you more comfortable, it wants to emerge you into the feeling of Earn having to choose what to spend the last of his money on (without trying to spoil anything, it’s a poignant moment).
There is a lot I want to say and discuss here, but I don’t want to rob you of the experience of watching it yourself for the first time. Donald Glover is very adamant in showing the other side of black culture, the one that we don’t see when other shows drop the curtain on reality. There are moments here that are downright uncomfortable, yet are much closer to reality than we’ve come to expect. Yes, there are also moments of comedic levity, not in the least due to a highlight performance from Keith Stanfield (or Snoop Dogg from Straight Outta Compton), but like in life, they do not as much disarm the situation as temporary dampen the iron cast pressure of reality.
Atlanta unfolds slowly and deliberately, feeling purposefully chaotic (what other show would take it’s main protagonist from the key story line early in its run for an entire episode). It is trying to have the conversation that we’re not used to having just yet and rewind the clock on shows like Empire. You really need to emotionally invest into this watching experience because it will bring you to the brink of reality and keep you there, instead sprinkling moments of fiction as other show’s treat reality. It’s the story of a city and its everyday people, not a story of a fictionalized success separate from the reality that produced it. Only one phrase comes to mind when watching Atlanta…
Man it feels good when it happens like that,
two days from going back to selling crack.
