Today’s TV landscape can be maddening because there's too much to watch,
with endless replicas of every kind of show.
Yet there's one creation that feels distinctly itself,
irreplaceable and unreproducible, one of a kind.
Of course, we're talking about Donald Glover’s Atlanta.
Robbin’ Season takes us further inside the mysterious rabbit hole
of Glover’s mind --
so let’s unpack the first two seasons of Atlanta
and how they’ve raised the bar for what television can be.
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It's in vogue these days to talk about
subverting traditional or linear narratives,
but Atlanta leaves behind conventional narrative structure
more profoundly and thoughtfully than the rest.
Its innovations in form have deeper thematic meaning driving them.
Season One gives us a set-up we’ve seen before.
"I don't want a handout, I want to manage you."
Then it gradually refuses to deliver what we’ve been conditioned to hope for,
by the many stories we’ve seen that have subtly trained us
to expect and desire certain outcomes.
"This isn't about rap.
If we do this right, your kids can live good,
my kids and live good, Darius' kids --"
"I can't have kids."
"I'm sure I'll find out why when the time's right."
We meet Earn, a young father who's not really together with Van,
the mother of his daughter Lottie.
"Mommy's going on a date with some corny dude!
Yeah, some corny dude!
What?
No, this is a great environment for you."
Earn is struggling to make ends meet, when he sees an opportunity
in the budding career of his cousin, Al, the rapper Paper Boi.
"Paper Boi, Paper Boi, all about that paper, boy."
We know that Earn is very smart -- he went to Princeton --
but we also know he dropped out,
"How's Princeton, by the way?
I think I know what happened."
"I really think you don't."
so that tells us he’s been missing some motivation or direction.
All of this on the surface seems like a perfect set-up
for a story about a plucky, smart guy rising out of tough circumstances,
and probably getting it to work with this girl in the process.
That’s pretty much the story that Glover says he pitched to FX,
but it's not the story we see.
"Nah, I'm sorry.
This is wack.
This is wack."
We spend the first season struggling to decipher
what the meandering, aimless Earn really wants out of his life,
if he wants anything at all.
Then the big reveal comes in the season one finale, “The Jacket.”
Earn is mysteriously fixated on recovering his jacket,
"Where's my jacket?"
which we finally learn is because he thinks it contains the key
to the storage unit he’s been living in.
We realize what has been driving him all season --
immediate fear for his survival,
desperation for a roof over his head.
Earn has been devoting all his energy not just to finding a place to sleep,
but also to hiding how severe this struggle is
from everyone in his life.
"Look, I'm not asking for money."
"You should be, ain't you homeless?"
"Not real homeless.
I'm not using a rat as a phone or something."
"Don't be racist, man."
In this moment, our initial expectations going into the narrative --
that this brilliant manager will take the music industry by storm --
feel completely out of touch,
because we’re given the perspective of a person who doesn’t know
where he’s going to sleep tonight.
Season One also grapples with stereotypes through its characters
in its own original way.
Earn and Vanessa are very aware of types they expect to be perceived as --
the dead-beat father who’s not supporting his daughter,
or the “angry black woman.”
"Why are you always turning me into the angry black woman?"
"'Cause you are."
"Are you kidding me?
I'm a stereotype?"
"Um-huh."
"While your ass, you can't even take care of your goddamn kid?
"I'm fine with being a stereotype.
It's working out great for me."
The more obvious thing for the show to do
would be to demonstrate how Earn and Van don’t fit these stereotypes,
how they prove those damaging labels wrong.
But instead the show is exploring why the characters are stuck in ruts
that they can’t escape, however much they want to.
Self-improvement and upward arcs are the lifeblood of American comedies --
look at hits like The Office and Parks and Recreation
which took cringeworthy, unlikable lead characters
and turned them into lovable, success stories
that rewarded audience investment over time.
Atlanta doesn’t want to participate in this arc.
When Earn play-acts the perfect boyfriend,
"She honestly doesn't get the credit she deserves.
I mean, ever.
But that doesn't deter her from being what she is,
which is a mother, a provider, and a partner."
Van doesn’t have an amazing rom com moment where she realizes he truly loves her;
"I don't think I could even look at another woman."
instead she gets upset because this mocking behavior from Earn
is so far from what their reality is.
"Will you excuse me?"
Earn's and Van’s relationship doesn’t progress --
as we see more conclusively in Robbin' Season.
"I want to be in a committed relationship
where I'm valued as a human being and not as an accessory
that you can f-[BLEEP]."
"I don't know what I want.
I-I know this arrangement works for me."
Glover said to the New Yorker,
“At FX, they didn’t get Earn and Van at all,”
“I said, ‘This is every one of my aunts --
you have a kid with a guy, he’s around, you’re still attracted to
him.’
Poor people can’t afford to go to therapy.”
Al, too, fits into a type.
But the point again isn’t to make people more comfortable
by proving the stereotype wrong --
Al suffers thanks to this persona, but he also leans into it and embraces it.
"Play your part.
People don't want Justin to be the asshole.
They want you to be the asshole.
You're a rapper.
That's your job."
And episodes like B.A.N. refuse to soften the character’s edges.
"Look, my life is messed up from [BLEEP] y'all did, okay?
That's black news.
You can look that up."
"Well, your news is problematic."
"Bitch, that ain't my fault!"
More than plot, the first season was held together by its tone,
which seems to come out of the collaboration
between Glover and his frequent director Hiro Murai.
You can even see that tone developing in this early film they did together,
and in the music videos they've collaborated on.
"This is America."
Season One was pretty formally revolutionary,
but Robbin’ Season has taken all this to even more interesting ground.
The second season, Robbin’ Season,
is filled with foreboding, darkness and threat --
including from within and from those closest to us.
Glover has said,
“People come to ‘Atlanta’ for the strip clubs
and the music and the cool talking,
but the eat-your-vegetables part is
that the characters aren’t smoking weed all the time because it’s cool
but because they have P.T.S.D.
--
every black person does.
"It’s scary to be at the bottom, yelling up out of the hole,
and all they shout down is ‘Keep digging!
We’ll reach God soon!"
PTSD is an apt way of talking about the black experience
on a broader historical and cultural scale --
how do you overcome the PTSD that comes from centuries of slavery?
"Where are your ancestors from?"
"I don't know.
This spooky thing called "slavery" happened
and my entire ethnic identity was erased."
as well as on the individual level of a black person
who experiences racism today.
In Robbin’ Season we feel the characters
dealing with the lingering after-effects of trauma.
They're finally experiencing some success or progress,
but they’re haunted by their experiences and not able to escape what’s shaped them.
They’re still trapped.
"Do you think there's a black lawyer who's as good as your cousin?"
"There definitely is, but, um, part of being good at your job
are your connections,
and black people just don't have the connections that my cousin has.
For systemic reasons."
Glover has said, “The thesis behind the show
was to make people feel black.”
He also said I want them to really experience racism,
to really feel what it’s like to be black in America."
"Would you have told us the school was bad
if she really was a regular student?"
"If I see a steer smart enough to get out of the pen,
I leave the gate open."
Robbin’ Season is looking at the black experience
from inside the minds of more of its characters.
Earn is absent from entire episodes,
and we see him more from the perspective of the other people in his life.
"Let's go."
"I'm-I'm not in the mood."
"Seriously?"
We see Van’s desire for more in her life,
her urge to not be defined by her relationships.
"That's not all that I'm gonna be for the rest of my life,
is Lottie's mom."
We follow Van to a party where women pay to post Instagram pictures
with a Drake simulacrum -- a Drake-ulacrum, if you will.
But the understanding and insights she achieves in these episodes
don’t give her any deliverance from her problems.
"It's all fake.
There's no Drake."
So frustration and insight don’t get her anything.
In a particularly memorable episode, we follow Darius on a creepy adventure
into the house of Michael Jackson-esque Teddy Perkins,
played by Donald Glover in white face.
"I just use this to remember things."
[BEEPS] "Darius would like a glass of water when you have a moment."
Darius is our guide into the crazier pockets and mini-worlds within Atlanta.
It’s through this character that we understand Glover’s statement
that Atlanta is, quote,
"Wild West-y -- every corner of the city is trying to get by under its own rules.
There’s no single narrative."
This quote explains something to us about the way the narrative of the show itself
follows different strands into different worlds, to capture the persona of its city.
Most strikingly in Robbin’ Season, we see inside Al’s mind a lot more.
We follow Al without Earn in two separate episodes
about normal days that spin out of control,
despite his best efforts to stop the chaos
and keep a handle on his reality.
We feel Al’s growing anxieties over stagnation,
his fear that he’s not taking the right steps
when time is limited to truly capture this window of opportunity.
In “Woods,” Al is uncomfortable with the new world he’s entering,
as embodied by his Instagram famous lady friend Ciara.
"People gonna get tired of seeing a sweaty nigga in a polo and cargo shorts.
Nobody wants somebody famous to look just like them."
After she proposes joining their brands in a fake-ish relationship,
"We could be good together.
We can attach our brands."
then snaps a photo of him, Al walks off in a rage.
But he finds himself attacked by fans,
who go after him precisely because he’s Paper Boi.
"Man, we love that new song, bruh."
It’s not the first time we’ve seen his growing status
make him a target.
"You'll be all right though.
You know what I'm saying?
Your song is hot, bruh.
Probably go platinum or some shit."
"I ain't making no money off that f-[BLEEP]-ing song, nigga."
In "Woods," All keeps insisting he wants to stay real,
"Hey, look, no offense, but, um I ain't into all that fake shit.
I'm just trying to stay real."
but in this episode he has to face the fact that things have changed,
and he can’t keep acting like they haven’t.
Al retreats into the woods where he meets an aggressive vagrant,
who seems to be a manifestation of Al’s mind.
"You is just like your mama."
In dreams and art, woods are a frequent symbol for feeling lost.
Dante’s Inferno opens with the lines --
"Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita mi ritrovai per una selva oscura,
ché la diritta via era smarrita."
This piece of Al's consciousness holds him at knife-point
and insists that he must find a way out of his personal labyrinth.
"I'm-a count to 30,
and if you ain't walked out of here by then,
I'm gonna hurt you."
And Al’s new resolve gets him out of the woods.
And his next interaction with a fan shows us what’s changed inside him --
he embraces the mechanisms of celebrity, posing for a picture with the boy,
and even flashing a bloody grin to play into his public image.
"Thank you."
In the next episode, “North of the Border,”
we get an update on Al’s and Earn’s professional relationship.
Al is observing the difference between experienced managers in his business,
and Earn’s amateurish mistakes.
"Man, we doing a show.
At Statesboro.
For free."
Earn spends the episode obsessing over the annoying behavior of Tracy.
Perhaps if this were back in Season 1, we’d be more in Earn’s mind;
we’d buy into his perspective that Tracy is messing it all up.
But we’re seeing through Al’s eyes now, and as much of a mess as Tracy is,
Al’s right when he says --
"Man, you gonna act like tonight wasn't a bunch of your bad decisions?
That bitch, man, that bitch was crazy from the start, man.
And you knew that.
And you still put me in the same room with her ass
so you could save the same amount of money I would have made in an hour or less."
In the show we were imagining at the start of the series,
this is where Earn would be proving he’s a whiz in this business,
enjoying their newfound success in some Entourage-style montages.
But instead we’re seeing people who can’t escape their experiences
or some of their own bad habits.
Earn, who recently spent most of his days worrying about where he’ll sleep,
can’t suddenly switch into a person who understands that it’s not worth it
to save money on a hotel by bunking with an unstable college girl.
Then in the next episode FUBU,
we look back at Al and Earn as kids
and we understand that some version of this dynamic --
of Al feeling he’s had to shoulder Earn’s baggage --
has been going on for a long time.
"I'm serious, Al.
I need your help.
I'm not cool like you."
By this point, we're remembering Al’s reluctance to work with Earn
in the first season,
"Oh, boy, you think you slick.
You coming in here, acting like you saving me,
when really, I'm saving you again."
and while it seemed odd to us then, now it kind of clicks.
"Al just trying to make sure you ain't failing in in his life.
You know, like, y'all both black, so I mean, y'all both can't afford to fail."
In the New Yorker, Glover discussed the way
that Earn’s and Al’s relationship is partly shaped by the differences
in how he and his own brother, Stephen, have been treated in their lives
due to differences in their skin color.
Earn as the lighter-skinned, book-smart cousin
seems like he has success ahead of him,
"You're pretty smart, Earn."
but he doesn’t get how society functions, whereas Al does.
Even from childhood, Al has grasped how he’s perceived
and how to work his place to his advantage.
"Do you know why you’re here today, Alfred?"
"Racism.
Not everybody’s gonna like me."
But in the season finale,
Earn finally gets Al to see him in a new light
when he does what he has to do, not to fail
"We should hurry."
"All right."
"Whose bag is this?"
after articulating the “Crabs in a barrel” phenomenon
which gives the episode its title.
"Niggas do not care about us, man.
Niggas gonna do whatever they got to do to survive,
'cause they ain't got no choice.
We ain't got no choice, either."
Al concludes with an affirmation of what his cousin just proved to him --
"You my family, Earn.
Yeah, you-you're the only one that knows what I'm about.
You give a f-[BLEEP].
I need that."
Earn moving the gun into Clark’s bag before Clark moves it to Lucas’
is even a parallel to how Al saves Earn in FUBU
by making the kids think the other boy’s shirt is fake --
in both cases, someone innocent has to go down.
Through Al, Robbin’ Season is also exploring questions of creativity
and how the artist fits into today’s world.
In Barbershop, Al suffers a horrendous day
to get a haircut with his go-to barber --
but when he finally gets it, that guy is good.
And when Al gets revenge for his day of hell by changing barbers,
he feels immediate regret --
because his old barber is an artiste and nobody else compares.
The episode could be read as a playful analogy
for the difficult artist --
perhaps Glover himself even identifies as such,
and is aware of all the bad and sometimes crazy
that comes with the art.
"I'm an actor, a writer, and a singer.
Some people have described me as a triple threat.
But I kind of like to call myself just a threat."
In Teddy Perkins,
Teddy has been scarred by his father’s philosophy
that creativity comes from pain.
"My father used to say, 'Great things come from great pain.'"
Darius counters that --
"What if you would have been great at something else?
Or if you would have seen the love instead of all the other shit like,
like Stevie."
And the episode ends with the music of Stevie Wonder,
which is a declaration that the best art can and should come from love.
"Evil, why have you destroyed so many minds?
Then in "Woods," as we’ve seen Al’s grappling with what it takes
to become a professional in today's world of the arts and celebrity.
"Woods" is about the person of the artist coming to terms with
what it takes to move forward in this world and play the game,
despite all of its ridiculous elements.
All of this may be a way for Glover and the show itself
to introspect on how to fit into today’s commercial-artistic landscape.
Atlanta makes us rethink the categories TV has to fit into.
It’s a comedy that leaves us deeply disturbed and sad.
It’s packed with surrealism --
Glover has called it "Twin Peaks with rappers"
yet people claim to love it particularly because it feels "real."
So Atlanta shows how surrealism, when done right,
can truly express reality.
So as trendy as it’s become to be non-traditional in your narrative,
Atlanta shows the power of that -- by mixing things up,
it reveals that these stories we’ve been conditioned to believe in
aren’t accurate indicators of how our lives are going to go.
In Robbin Season’ we can definitely see
that there is a forward-moving, deep story being told here --
yet what’s shaping the arc of that narrative
is not an artificial act-structure or end-game payoff,
but what the writers see as "reality."
It’s a story about the frustration of knowing what we want
but not being able to reach out and get it;
about the disconnect between our inner selves and a hostile, shallow, treacherous world;
about the absurdity of reality;
and about the powerlessness we often feel to change
what’s wrong in our lives or drive in the direction we crave.
All of these feelings are key parts of life that tend get resolved and fixed
on the big and little screens --
Atlanta has no intention of tying up those threads so neatly for us.
"And if you don't want to end up like me,
get rid of that 'chip on your shoulder' shit."
Hey guys, it's Susannah and Debra here.
Thank you so much for watching.
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