Atlanta Season 3 Review: Donald Glover's Surreal Comedy Is Back Like It Never Left

The world has changed a lot since Atlanta was last on TV. Season 2 of Donald Glover's visionary comedy series aired in 2018, before *gestures broadly at everything*. Season 3, which premieres March 24 on FX, arrives into an America that, for a few months in 2020, was trying to come to a better understanding of "how it felt to be Black," which Glover said was his "thesis" for the show before it premiered in 2016. But the world hasn't changed in a way that would make Atlanta's surreal, pessimistic depiction of being Black in a racist world obsolete. Things have only gotten weirder. The season premiere has a joke that accurately skewers the hollow institutional gestures toward inclusion that have become ever-present in the past few years. In an effort to include more Black history in its curriculum, a public school partners with the Atlanta Falcons and Domino's to take students to a screening of Black Panther 2. The joke is barely even satire. It's so perceptive that it feels like it's describing something that already happened. The world has caught up to Atlanta. 

Season 3 escalates the unpredictable, anything-can-happen structure of the first two seasons. The season premiere doesn't pick up where Season 2 left off or have any of the show's regular cast members, except for Earn (Glover) very briefly at the end, and follows a Black preteen boy on a disturbing Get Out-esque journey as he's adopted by a white foster family. It seems like a weird way to start a season after the show's been off for four years, but it's actually an overtly Atlanta thing to do. It would be stranger if Glover did what you expected him to do. And the dreamlike, Lynchian episode feels like a thematic prologue for the rest of the season. I can't say what that theme is for certain, because FX only sent two episodes for review and the season's actual narrative starts in the second one, but clearly this episode is the first episode for a reason. 

8.3

Atlanta

at Hulu

Like

• The show remains as funny and artistically inventive as ever
• It's not afraid to take risks

Dislike

• Limited review sample size could mask deficiencies over the whole season

The Season 3 premiere "Three Slaps" starts with a nightmare sequence where a white man and a Black man are fishing together, and the white man tells a ghost story about how the lake they're fishing on is haunted by the souls of the Black people who lived in a town that once stood where the lake is now and died when the government flooded the town when it dammed a river. The dreamer is a boy named Laquarius. After he acts up in school, a grim chain of events leads to Laquarius getting adopted by two hippie foster mothers. They're sinister white women who use seeming liberal benevolence as a cover for despicable racism. Like Season 2's legendary "Teddy Perkins," "Three Slaps" is a tense, surreal horror story with uncomfortably funny humor and a twist I won't spoil here. It's directed by Hiro Murai, who has been providing Atlanta with its oneiric sheen since the beginning. 

Murai also directs the second episode, "Sinterklaas Is Coming to Town," which catches back up with Earn, his friend Darius (LaKeith Stanfield), his rapper cousin Alfred aka Paper Boi (Brian Tyree Henry), and his ex Van (Zazie Beetz) in the midst of Paper Boi's European tour (Season 3 was filmed almost entirely in Europe). In the episode, Earn tries to bail Alfred out of a hotel-like European jail, while Darius and Van wander around Amsterdam searching for inspiration. It's a traditional Atlanta episode, where anything can and does happen, such as meeting a man who might be Tupac Shakur while he's in hospice care. Four years off has not made Atlanta into a different show. 

Atlanta remains one of TV's most distinctive shows, if not the most distinctive, artistically ambitious show of its era. It's hilarious, disturbing, sad, and silly all at once, and is unafraid to challenge its audience. It's intelligently confrontational humor that forces white viewers to consider what they're laughing at. Unless it somehow falls off a cliff in quality after the first two episodes, Atlanta Season 3 keeps the show's streak of being one of the best shows on TV alive. Neither of these two episodes are as good as Atlanta's best episodes, but it feels like episodes on the level of "Teddy Perkins" or "B.A.N." or "Barbershop" are coming.

Premieres: Thursday, March 24 on FX with the first two episodes; Available on Hulu the next day
Who's in it: Donald Glover, Brian Tyree Henry, LaKeith Stanfield, Zazie Beetz
Who's behind it: Donald Glover 
For fans of: Great television, dark humor, Get Out 
How many episodes we watched: 2 out of 10