5 Reasons You Need to Watch the Atlanta Premiere

One of the most promising comedies of the fall season, the premise of FX’s Atlanta is easy to describe, but far more difficult to define. A comedy about a wayward young man, Earnest Marks (star and show creator Donald Glover), the show follows his journey to succeed, as he navigates the minefields of being a father, trying to make money and also trying to make the right choices. At the point where the series begins, all of that’s about an emerging relationship with his cousin, Alfred “Paperboy” Miles (Bryan Tyree Henry), an up-and-coming rapper who has a viral hit on his hands.
That’s a familiar enough framework, but Glover isn’t content to merely tell a coming-of-age story. The series is deeply suffused with melancholy and informed by Glover’s own public struggles with his identity as a successful black man. Even at this early stage, Atlanta is deeply rooted in Glover’s singular worldview, while avoiding all the pitfalls that come with telling a story that feels so personal. Here are five reasons Atlanta is worth visiting.
1. Atlanta, The Big Peach
It’s tempting to classify Atlanta along with established and freshman comedies like Louie, Better Things, and One Mississippi based on their centralized narrative alone. They are, after all, shows that feel driven by their title character to the point of feeling like auteurism. But it’s far more productive to view them in relation to their setting. Just as a show like Louie underlines the sublime absurdity of New York through lyrical odes to the subway system, Atlanta’s titular setting has a gravitational pulse.
Earn’s neighborhood isn’t just a backdrop, it’s in constant conversation with his own personal rut. Poverty isn’t even a conversation, it’s just a casual expectation with so many of these characters—as seen with Earnest’s parents who don’t want to let him in the house for worry that their kindness will cost them the contents of their wallet.
But Atlanta’s social consciousness also isn’t about fetishizing the poverty of Atlanta, as much as recognizing that all these people are scraping by without facing deep repercussions like homelessness. They’re all waiting for their opportunity to be something bigger—and who knows when it’s going to come.
2. Donald Glover’s Writing
As much as Glover was regularly a scene-stealer on Community, with his exaggerated line readings and heightened reactions (There’ve been few performers in recent years who react more with their entire bodies to jokes), the show absolutely felt like a product of creator Dan Harmon’s imagination. Atlanta is a complete manifestation of Glover’s sensibilities, and unsurprisingly, it’s a very thoughtful show in its meld of comedy and philosophical contemplation.
Glover has a clear vision for how characters like Alfred and wide-eyed stoner Darius (Keith Stanfield, more on him later) talk to each other. And more importantly, he’s not afraid to skewer his own character—a person who’s not immune to overly serious monologues that verge on self-parody. One of the first scenes of the pilot perfectly establishes the tone as Earnest starts recounting a dream he had to the mother of his infant daughter, before she interrupts and starts picking apart the details. His head is in the clouds, but everyone’s dragging him back to Earth.