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A lot of social theorists believe
that our modern, internet-enabled society
has created an environment in which we
are molded, almost exclusively, by the entertainment that we
engage with.
Now not in the "video games cause violence" kind of way,
but in the "interest accumulate through experience"
kind of way.
So where does that put a show like Donald Glover's Atlanta?
Some of you may know this, and some of you may not.
Donald Glover is one of my favorite artists
of any kind in the world.
And Atlanta is special.
The show's narrative flexibility, its versatility,
it is a masterclass in visual storytelling
and cinematic creativity.
From its perfectly cast actors, to its mixture
of flashy visuals and gritty world-building,
this is a show that almost no one saw coming.
This is a former comedic actor, a standup,
a rapper turned would-be cable show runner,
and this is certainly not what somebody would have expected
someone with those adjectives to attempt
with their fledgling outing, let alone do so successfully.
However, making a great series and making a great pilot
are two distinctly different tasks.
Yes, Atlanta is viewed as one of the most
critically-acclaimed shows currently on FX,
or on television, period.
With the exception of Season Two being so rapturous,
the network ordered, not one, but two seasons for its pickup.
But its pilot was a different story, well,
with a lot of similarities.
The primary aspect of Atlanta's pilot that is so impressive
is how understated and refined it is.
Nothing is out of place.
It's lean and considered in its choices.
It knows who its characters are from the get go.
And it relishes in their flaws and imperfections
where most shows would shy away, rather
than being a traditional pilot, which usually attempts
to communicate what an average episode of the show
would be like, while providing context for the story engine
that will propel the rest of the series.
Atlanta's pilot opts for a much more subtle and stripped down
approach.
The structure of this initial foray into the world of Earnest
"Earn" Marks and "Paper Boy" is a simple day-in-the-life story.
The conflict is minimal.
There's no contrived movie-style inciting event, no meet cutes,
and no highly commercial elements
that would theoretically entice a development
executive into buying the show.
It's just an average, everyday struggle, the young man,
his daughter, his ex, and is trying
to figure out how to survive.
Balancing your love life, paying bills, and attempting
to outrun your past might not sound like an exciting 23
minutes, but Atlanta's pilot is a slow burn
that sucks you in before you realize it's been 23 minutes.
Dealing with the social fallout of the decisions you've made
is a heady concept for a pilot, specifically
to deal with throughout its entire runtime.
But over the course of this episode,
we see Earn interact with individuals
from almost every walk of life, his mother and father, who
are tired of being as caretakers,
again his ex, who is tired of supporting their daughter
alone, and his cousin who suspects
that Earn has reappeared in his life only as a means
to siphon off some of the young burgeoning rap star's
potential fortune.
However, believe it or not, Atlanta
was almost a very different show than this.
The pilot script originally opened with Earn
at Princeton University in 2006.
In a tense two-page scene, Earn is
being questioned by the Dean of the University
about something that he's done wrong.
Earn is stoic and is described as being in shock.
He doesn't respond to any of the questions
being asked, with a scene climaxing and finally saying,
I woke up.
This atmospheric and cryptic opening
would have set a distinctly different tone
for not just the pilot, but the series.
And it's little tweaks like this that
can make all the difference in the world.
That scene would have been dramatically out of place
for, well, what the pilot set the stage for.
This cold open, while still being character-focused,
the previous one I mean, is centered
on the character's back story coloring
the events of the pilot, as opposed
to an active cold open that propels forward
into the narrative.
In the existing cold open that was shot,
we see Earn, Paper Boy and Darius
get involved in a shooting, which
appears to end in a murder.
This gives the entire show a much more concrete thrust
and lets you know exactly what you're in for.
What's even more interesting about how this plays out
is that this narrative thread, which,
in a less skilled storyteller's hands,
would have been picked up directly in episode 2 or 3,
is almost nearly abandoned, left to work as background
radiation for the entire world of the television show.
The pilot here is essentially a very good 30-minute short film.
It stands on its own, while still being a launching
pad for what's to come.
That's really important here because Atlanta borrows heavily
from its cinematic influences, from the handheld kineticism
of the opening sequence to drone shots leading out
of the cold open into the shots of the city of Atlanta.
And to bind its influences and its, well, platform,
being television together, is pure directorial ability.
The true magic of Atlanta lies in its thinly laced layer
of surrealism.
With only two moments of otherworldliness in the pilot,
it's almost as if you blink, and you'll
miss just how strange the world of Atlanta is going to get.
And that kind of teasing is what hooks people for the long run.
For example, early on, Darius seems
to be aware he's in a TV show.
He remarks that he's feeling déja vu and asks where the dog
is, only to turn around and discover a dog.
OK, where the dog with the Texas on him?
There he is.
That's a trip, man.
Then later in the pilot, Earn rides the bus
with a man making a Nutella sandwich.
They have a brief, but deeply strange,
conversation, which ends with a man getting off the bus
prematurely, and being accompanied by a dog, which was
not in the rest of the scene.
These seedlings of surrealism are
what will grow into Teddy Perkins,
Black Justin Bieber, and the invisible car,
some of the most exciting and enticing television produced
in the last decade.
And all of that is only possible because of the guide
rails that the pilot set up.
In the age of premium streaming, the general public
seems to have almost completely forgotten
just how bland most pilots used to be,
when pilots didn't have the ability
to take these kinds of risks.
A network pilot is traditionally split up into three
acts-- a cold open, a stinger, and your body, essentially.
These three acts introduce a simplistic conflict
centered around an A and B plot that typically converge
by the end of the episode in thematic- and character-centric
conclusion.
The Atlanta pilot has the rough bones of those elements,
but executed in a way that's fairly arthouse.
There's no forced conclusion, no throw to commercial
end-of-the-act jokes, and no artificiality that would come
with something like a laugh track.
Glover's writing on the Atlanta pilot
shows a clear understanding of structure
and how to play with it.
Everything in the pilot builds on itself, which brings us
to the final element we're going to discuss today,
which is the title of the pilot, normally
something you'd look over and something that really shouldn't
matter.
Titles can tell us a lot about the intention
of a specific piece of art.
But typically in television, they're
not even something you look at, nor do they need to be.
They can act as a clue into the minds of the people who
worked on the project.
But usually they're an afterthought.
So often in the studio system, titles are marketing.
Products are re-titled to attempt
to make them more commercial.
This very rarely works.
And yet, this practice continues to be
instituted across the board.
Upon its release, the Atlanta pilot
was titled "The Big Bang," A cheeky pun,
if you're paying attention.
Obviously, it nods to both the theoretical creation
of the universe and the violent act
that Paper Boy commits in the cold open.
It's drawing a metaphor that predicts, in quintessential hip
hop fashion, Atlanta being one of the greatest
shows of all time, maybe.
Not quite yet, but the potential.
It's a TV show equivalent of when
a rapper proclaims themselves the greatest of all time.
And who knows?
Maybe Atlanta will be, one day.
It's certainly too early.
However, the show instantly became a critical darling,
sweeping award shows and pulling high ratings for FX.
And that pilot was where it all started.
Simple, clean, free of self-reflexive second guessing,
in people pleasing.
To put it bluntly, without question,
Atlanta's pilot, regardless of title,
is the best initial episode of any television
program of the last decade.
Well guys, that's it for today's episode of Nerdstalgic.
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