The Season Premiere of Atlanta Is Everything We Love About Atlanta, with Added Emphasis

Even the episode’s first minutes, in which a nondescript afternoon of videogames and fast food becomes a stick-up gone wrong, is surprisingly beautiful, from the hazy, almost smoky light streaming into the man’s apartment to that soaring pan across the city, sirens replacing the woman’s cries. After all, Atlanta is a series in which crimes and punishments are ubiquitous, and in which Earn (out $375 and a urine sample for a useless drug awareness class), Alfred (under house arrest), Alfred’s friend (just out of prison), and Uncle Willy (afraid enough of catching a charge that he lets loose that gator) nonetheless find reasons to argue, rib each other, taste sliders, exchange conspiracy theories, etc. You know, the stuff of life. There’s no effort to ignore the fact that a drive-thru cashier carries an assault weapon, but there’s also no suggestion that the people populating Glover’s Atlanta are uniformly grim or humorless as a result. There’s love—as Earn professes to the baffled Darius and Alfred. There’s kindness—Earn forking over that $100 to keep the peace. There’s laughter and discomfort and inappropriate pets, all in spite of the fact that probationary classes and police visits are far more likely to be visited upon poor, black people than their rich, white counterparts.

It’s telling, really, that the most emphatic treatment of crime is the Darius-narrated montage featuring Florida Man, whom he describes (and Atlanta depicts) as a sort of face-eating, flamingo-punching, havoc-wreaking “alt-right Johnny Appleseed.” Fittingly, given Stanfield’s role in the film, “Alligator Man” enables a similar confusion of expectations as Get Out: “Florida Man,” the real-life trope, is a gag at the expense of poor, white trash devised by white elites on the Internet; Florida Man, in Darius’ reckoning, is actually dangerous, the Bigfoot of white villainy. One man’s humor is another man’s horror, which is to say that Atlanta’s rich imagination is rooted in its desire to do its context justice.

On the basis of the season premiere, capped by that gator’s delicious slow saunter and Willy’s simultaneous escape, “Robbin’ Season” promises to be the same lived-in, eccentric, superbly crafted comedy Atlanta always been, only this time with added emphasis. Though it’s absent the sheer newness of “B.A.N.,” there’s nothing shy about “Alligator Man”; on every front—character development, narrative vigor, aesthetic assurance, political subtext—it punches harder on the soft spots Season One unknotted. Maybe most importantly, tonight’s episode confirms that Atlanta remains vivacious and prickly and truly hysterical, the sort of series I’m already sad will someday end, even as it’s just getting going. Then again, I don’t believe in the concept of time, so I guess I’m off the hook.