SummaryEarnest "Earn" Marks (Donald Glover) returns to his hometown of Atlanta to discovers his cousin Alfred Miles (Brian Tyree Henry) is seen as a hot upcoming rapper and seeks to guide his career to the big time.
SummaryEarnest "Earn" Marks (Donald Glover) returns to his hometown of Atlanta to discovers his cousin Alfred Miles (Brian Tyree Henry) is seen as a hot upcoming rapper and seeks to guide his career to the big time.
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.
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.
Absolutely brilliant. Every episode has been an amazing journey and it’s such a pleasure to sit back and take in what Donald Glover and team have cooked up. Incredible!
I considered Atlanta a great show after Season 1 and 2. This season, in my opinion, cements the status of Atlanta as one of the greatest tv shows of all time.
FX is going with two episodes for the long-awaited season premiere night, and they somehow have even less in common tonally than “Barbershop” and “Teddy Perkins” did, while being alternately as ridiculous and chilling as the most memorable moments of each of those.
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.
It may have taken four years for Atlanta to come back, but it’s lost none of its daring in the interim. We do prefer the episodes where Earn and crew are all together, but we’re looking forward to seeing where Glover and company take their storytelling this season.
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.
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.
It's been a long four years since Atlanta graced our television screens, yet nothing has truly changed. It is still fresh, unique, surrealistic, and above all poignant. It keeps pushing the boundaries of what to expect and even of what is acceptable. After such a long hiatus there is always a fear that a show has lost its magic, but Glover keeps proving that the creative genius cap that was placed on his head nearly a decade ago is not unearned. I am looking forward to seeing where this season is going because I have no doubt it will keep surprising me.
After a long awaited 3rd season, I'm sad to say I was rather disappointed. This season, as a whole, was far more of a mixed bag than the first two seasons, which I consider some of the best TV produced in the last decade. It has some highs (Three Slaps and The Old Man and the Tree stood out to me as great episodes in particular), but the rest of the season, at many points, just doesn't feel the same to me. A lot of the humor that made the first two seasons stand out got sidelined for more of the horror elements, which is not a bad thing, but does make some points of the season feel dry. The main cast gets sidelined for over half the season as well, which is a bold decision but one that ultimately doesn't work. Many people (myself included) loved the first two seasons for the leads, and for them to not even be in 5 of the episodes feels wrong and like fans of the show got ripped off. Finally, while some episodes feel unique in their thematic elements, others feel very much like they retread on themes of previous seasons. Overall, I hope for better things in the final season (and hopefully a return to Atlanta the city, rather than hopping all over Europe), but I must say the triumphant return of the series feels more like a roller coaster than consistent quality.