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Positive:
96
Mixed:
2
Negative:
0
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Critic Reviews
Sep 15, 2022
Season 4 Review:
I loved the first episode and found many things to mull over and enjoy in the next two, and I liked how they play as an extension of where we left off in the third season. ... It’s still not a world in which they’re comfortable or consistently welcomed. That pervasive unease, equal parts hilarious and nightmarish, may be Atlanta‘s ultimate commentary on storytelling and on contemporary America. I intend to relish this closing run of eight episodes, whatever they happen to be.
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RogerEbert.comSep 14, 2022
Season 4 Review:
It synthesizes love, violence, and confusion into an expert investigation of what motivates the pursuits of Black people. ... Yet among the expected amount of absurdist comedy, there are true moments of emotional impact regarding stigmatized aspects of Black life. ... It’s masterful at taking tangible, conspicuous culture and emboldening the value of it; such hyper-visibility and crafting of the real into the surreal-but-undeniable is what’s cementing the legacy of the series.
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iJun 30, 2022
Season 3 Review:
Is this a sketch? A meta-critique of cancel culture? Or is Neeson just standing up and staying sorry? It is possibly all three at once. Above all, it is darkly, hysterically funny. And that is the genius of Atlanta – a comedy that is full of horror and bleak chuckles.
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The GuardianJun 29, 2022
The TelegraphJun 29, 2022
Season 3 Review:
It goes without saying that it is a show with a strong flavour and it won’t be for everyone, but Atlanta is a true great of the form, making other comedy-dramas feel like the toy you get inside a Kinder Egg. Atlanta is the Great American Novel trapped inside a flatscreen TV.
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Mar 25, 2022
Season 3 Review:
The show traveled past the point of cementing its assured artistry in its second season. When it announces it is upping the ante, we can trust it knows what it's doing. These two episodes back up this assumption, both through the premiere's side trip from the main storyline and the gang's travels into an unknown place where they're considered as both foreign and other.
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Mar 24, 2022
Season 3 Review:
[The first episode is] a standalone episode chilling enough to rival season 2 highlight “Teddy Perkins,” in which the series’ increasingly illustrious cast is all but absent. ... Unsparing is, among others, the right word to describe these two conjoined episodes, if not the show as a whole. It justifies the persistence of Atlanta, an entire ocean away from Atlanta.
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Mar 23, 2022
Season 3 Review:
The two-episode Season 3 premiere, airing Thursday, is “Atlanta” in top form, going to new places while maintaining that unsettling sense of never knowing how the ground might shift. ... Spectacular and haunting first episode. ... The two episodes sent to critics for review are a mere peek, but they give no sign of the show’s having lost a step in the past four years.
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Mar 19, 2022
ColliderMar 19, 2022
Season 3 Review:
Even though we know to expect the unexpected from Atlanta, the series still remains one of the indefinable and unique shows ever made, a shock to the television landscape that is unlike anything else. Atlanta has always been great, but with these first two episodes of Season 3, it continues its path of becoming one of the all-time greats.
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The Daily BeastMar 1, 2018
Season 2 Review:
Atlanta Season 2 is funny. The laughs are often as unexpected as they are uncomfortable, and the series delights in pushing you to the edge before dropping an unexpected punchline. ... But Atlanta’s oddness is its greatest strength. It’s a show that feels as hard-to-define as its characters; what seems easy to explain on the surface gets messy and complicated upon further examination.
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Mar 1, 2018
Season 2 Review:
[A] trippy, incisive comedy. ... The show always finds jokes in the bleakest of situations, like how the season opens with a chatty car ride turned armed robbery, featuring some truly expert tonal whiplash. But the moments in which Earn and his friends can just be themselves are casually, wonderfully funny in a way that highlights how much they have to hold themselves back just about everywhere else.
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Mar 1, 2018
Season 2 Review:
With its second season, Atlanta--subtitled “Robbin’ Season,” for the holiday season crime spree that engulfs the city--is even more atmospheric, with the measured confidence of an Olympic athlete. ... It shows us how easily “wrongdoing” slips under our skin and becomes a part of us. Few other shows are so capably transporting--not to a time or a city but a way of being, a way of living, that is only now being translated to screen.
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Feb 28, 2018
Season 2 Review:
In the second season of the Emmy-winning comedy, he [Donald Glover] breaks even more rules, again with dazzling and deserved confidence. ... The performances are superb at every level, and the direction, mostly by Hiro Murai, is equal to the levels of excellence in the acting and the scripts by Glover, his brother Stephen and others.
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Feb 28, 2018
Season 2 Review:
The so-called Robbin’ Season has the characters confront stranger obstacles, and this gives the writers fresh opportunities to venture into places no other comedy on television can, or is brave enough to attempt. The tone in Atlanta flips from moment to moment without warning, and without alienating viewer. ... And there is a cartoonish craziness to these new episodes that can be mind-boggling even while incorporating honest commentary about the reality of living in today’s America.
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RogerEbert.comFeb 27, 2018
Season 2 Review:
What I find most remarkable about Atlanta is the tonal balance and the confidence, something Glover has always displayed as an artist. Earn Marks may not be that confident in his life, but it takes an amazingly assured creative voice to calibrate comedy, drama, and social satire to such perfect degrees on shows like this one. In just three episodes, there is a typical season’s worth of character, commentary, and humor. I can’t wait to see more.
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UPROXXFeb 27, 2018
Season 2 Review:
Glover and friends seem to have hit on a new way to surprise the audience: by making Atlanta, at least for a while, into a more conventional TV show. The three episodes given to critics are by far the most consistent in terms of story and tone of any comparable stretch from season one. ... Atlanta can be great because you never expect what it might do next. But that’s far from the only reason it’s great, as the start of season two so potently demonstrates.
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Feb 26, 2018ColliderFeb 20, 2018
Season 2 Review:
It’s clear that Glover knew what worked in Season 1, which already came out of the gate as a bold and confident series, and Season 2 is a continuation of that, bucking a trend of sophomore slumps for auteur-driven television shows. ... Each of the first three episodes reveals a robbery of some kind that all manage to be both funny and sad. It’s a balance Atlanta does especially well, and the series is again elevated by the style of director Hiro Murai, who truly creates his own world for these characters to inhabit.
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IndieWireFeb 20, 2018
Season 2 Review:
Not only does it further Earn’s motivation in intriguing new ways, but it invites a broader understanding of his perspective. His problems are both his and so many others’. Brothers Donald and Stephen Glover, who penned the episodes, continue to find natural rhythms to convey the bigger picture.
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Feb 17, 2018
Season 2 Review:
Like any surreal entertainment, Atlanta is always in danger of becoming too precious, hitting that "Life Aquatic" phase where quirky style becomes empty weirdness. But after a long, awardsy break, the opening episodes of Robbin' Season let me thrilled, surprised, and scared.
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Feb 16, 2018
Season 2 Review:
Atlanta is the warped reflection that an absurd country deserves. ... Few shows are as good at building to dizzying heights of weirdness without clueing you in that anything out of the ordinary is happening. Fewer still have such an astute grasp of how mobile devices and internet connections have allowed everyone of every social class, race, and ethnicity to compulsively document their lives.
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Sep 6, 2016
Season 1 Review:
Atlanta is one of the year’s best, and it is like nothing else on television, maybe ever. Imagine a series with the ambition and charge of The Wire, the reflective gallows comedy of Louie, and Glover’s unique brand of subtle brilliance--and then you’ll be getting close to having some sense of where Atlanta seems to be heading. It’s a series you can’t afford to miss.
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Sep 2, 2016
Sep 1, 2016
Season 1 Review:
Though the show contains laugh-out-loud moments, it occasionally proves to be more melancholy than mirthful. Along the way, it has some sharp things to say about race, gender, the absurdity of celebrity and the nagging fear of failure. Glover's Atlanta, it turns out, has all the right beats.
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Sep 1, 2016
Season 1 Review:
The scripts for the four episodes made available to critics are as richly nuanced as anything you’ll see on TV or, to be sure, in a movie theater. You will not only know these characters after only one episode, you’ll be hooked on them, as well. In so many areas, Atlanta sets the bar exceptionally high.
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Mar 23, 2022
Season 3 Review:
Threading in these many varied parts and themes into what is, once again, one of TV’s most intriguing pieces of performance art. But it’s also saying something in an artful way; this is not TV vegetables, there aren’t lessons to be learned exactly. There are thoughtful impressions, strange occurrences, exceptional happenstance. In many ways, Atlanta is creating its own folklore.
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Mar 23, 2022
Season 3 Review:
It's a relief to report that creator Donald Glover and his collaborators have not lost their capacity for vital tone-clashing comedy. There are laugh-out-loud moments right alongside skin-crawling bits of social awkwardness, plus some outright shocks. Everything has changed, but Atlanta minus Atlanta is still Atlanta.
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Mar 1, 2018
Season 2 Review:
Patience is required by and rewarded in the three episodes screened for critics: Some stage-setting is necessary to illustrate changes in the characters lives, but it also fits with the moseying pace and under-the-influence tenor Glover and director Hiro Murai struck in the first season.
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Aug 29, 2016
Season 1 Review:
An intense drug deal plays out with character-based nuance, more about the personalities in the room than the chance that guns will start blazing, while an episode set largely in the holding room of a jail finds drama in the assorted, transfixing plights of one-off characters.
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Mar 24, 2022Mar 19, 2022
Season 3 Review:
No other show on TV is doing the thing that Atlanta does, with its doses of humor, surrealism, horror, travelogue and hip-hop as genre-blending starting points for an uncomfortable exploration of racial identity in America. Even shows that have justifiably evoked comparisons to Atlanta — remarkable FX sibling Reservation Dogs comes to mind — represent more the potential to be the next Atlanta than occupying a place of actual peerage.
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Sep 6, 2016
Season 1 Review:
It’s melancholy, amusing, clever, insightful, humane, and, with its beautifully shot Atlanta location, steeped in local specificity. There are a few moments in the four episodes sent to critics when the emotional beats are hazy, the ideas vague, the vibe too meditative; but there are many, many more points when the show blows you away with its intelligence, humanity, and unwillingness to rush or telegraph any of its jokes or misfortunes.
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TV Guide MagazineSep 2, 2016
Season 1 Review:
Danny Glover's Atlanta is steeped in an urban hard-knocks authenticity. [5-18 Sep 2016, p.22]
Mar 23, 2022
Season 3 Review:
The new episodes live up to the ones that came before, although only two were made available for review. Both run the gamut of what "Atlanta" can be: Bold, experimental, and allegorical; comedic and astute examinations of the mundanities and oddities of Black life. They remain singular, exceptional and thought-provoking in the way only "Atlanta" episodes can be.
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Mar 19, 2022
Season 3 Review:
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.
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TV Guide MagazineMar 1, 2018
Season 2 Review:
It's hard to know where any of this is headed, but Atlanta is still destination TV. [5 Mar - 18 Mar 2018, p.13]
Sep 2, 2016
Season 1 Review:
One thing Atlanta does particularly well is to convey the shakiness of an economy in which a child of working- or middle-class parents can struggle, even end up homeless, setting it against the backdrop of the less-official economy on which many rely. That Atlanta manages to be drily funny, too, is a gift.
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ColliderAug 29, 2016
Season 1 Review:
Like Baskets or even Louie, Atlanta is a deeply specific portrait of a certain way of life, one that’s often desperate but that’s tempered--for our benefit--by a casual, sometimes even caustic humor. These moments are occasionally punctuated by bursts of violence, some of them shocking, but it never feels like there’s a statement being made so much as truth being shown.
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Mar 21, 2022
Season 3 Review:
Even more so than the first two seasons of the show, season three takes off with a murkily depressive bent. Natural light struggles to intrude on shades of gray; every actor is dead-eyed. ... In these first two episodes, the show’s narrative playfulness and comedic absurdity save it from descending into pure swampiness. ... But so far, the mood feels stubbornly reflexive.
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