Few series can afford to let almost four years pass between two of their seasons. Only to then, after a new season, leave audiences slightly confused and hungry for more. “Atlanta” is one of these series. It was clear early on that the superficially lucid story about college dropout Earn (Donald Glover) and his cousin, aspiring rapper Paper Boi (Bryan Tyree Henry) had far greater ambitions than just a bumpy story to tell the career of a talented hip-hop artist.
“Atlanta” was never satisfied with simple questions and answers: guns and weed, glamor and violence, freedom and paranoia determine the lives of the protagonists. Above all, the experience that it can be hard to unbearable to live as a black person in the USA in the 21st century.
Season two concluded with imminent career break Paper Bois embarking on a headlining European tour. Not without paying a price: Earn screwed up another rapper by sneaking a loaded gun in his luggage just before airport security. Career? Yeah! But only at the expense of others.
Season three is now not only four years apart, it also denies the direct point of contact. Rather than following Earn, Paper Boi, and Darius, episode one – like two other episodes this season – throws us into a self-contained, superficially unrelated mini-story. These episodes seem as if Jordan Peele (“Get Out”, “Us” and “Nope”) had a hand in them: As a kind of “Twilight Zone” three glimpses into different parallel universes unfold here. One in which reparations for slavery were enforced and the lives of many people rearranged; one in which the true case of Devonte, who tragically died in the double suicide of his foster parents, is given a happy ending; one in which the death of an upper-class New York nanny leads to eerie events.
Between these episodes, the odyssey of the trio takes place, which, joined by Earn’s ex-girlfriend Vanessa (Zazie Beetz), forms a quartet that seems to wander aimlessly through Europe. But the brave new world of glitter made possible by Paper Boi’s success reveals imponderables and pitfalls. Whether in the bizarre environment of a billionaire party between high-stakes poker and art patron rip-off, on a spiritual self-discovery trip (emphasis on trip) in Amsterdam or as the unbelievable adventure of a cannibalistic “Irma Vep meets Amelie cutie in Paris” – “Atlanta” leaves never look at the cards on his wild ride. As usual, it’s about big issues, cleverly hidden in small stories: How “real” and truthful can one be in an environment in which self-portrayal is the highest good? How social can you be in a world that only seems to honor egoism? Can I be a good person and be successful at the same time?
As a series that is even more difficult to grasp and categorize in season three than before, “Atlanta” is an exception in the glut of interchangeable series content. As a decidedly political series that, however, without an agenda, clothes all observations in surreal weirdness and undeniably concise episodes, “Atlanta” is one of the few series of the year that deserves the title “unmissable”.
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