I Wouldn’t Have Believed It When The Year Started: But I Wasn’t Looking Forward To The Final Season Of FX atlanta. It seemed inconceivable that the brilliant and hilarious show starring Donald Glover, Zazie Beetz, Lakeith Stanfield and Brian Tyree Henry about the blackest parts of one of America’s blackest cities could end up on my “I’ll binge later” list. .
But that was the case after the show’s third season, which aired earlier this year, delivered a haphazard, clunky, and unmotivated batch of episodes. However, the fourth season ended up being the best in the already impressive catalog of the show. What added up to a year that gave us the best of atlanta and the worst of atlanta. And a farewell that was well worth the ups and downs.
Season three delivered its thesis statement in its opening scene: a white man and a black man on a boat, the white man explaining the worst atrocities and hateful inclinations embedded in anti-blackness. The rest of the season would focus on, well, white people. The first episode reimagined the real-life Hart family murder-suicides, where a white family killed their adopted black children. Another episode centered on a white man in a story about reparations. And perhaps the worst episode of season three was about a black kid trying to pass as white.
The episodes were clunky at best, showing that Glover didn’t have the range to address issues of race relations in a way that added anything substantial to the discourse. Most importantly, the shows weren’t really funny. Just trite.
The third season also seemed to be aiming for an elephant in the room: the four stars of atlanta everything had become megastars in early 2022. Perhaps they weren’t as preoccupied with this little upstart project as they were when it premiered in 2016.
Thankfully, that all changed when the show’s fourth and final season began in September. atlanta It went back to what made the show great: its uninhibited focus on black people from the South. For the most part, the fourth season returned the white characters to the ancillary slots they occupied in the show’s first two seasons. The show went back to dealing with what it means to be black in a city that calls itself utopia but has real beautiful bruises.
The fourth season featured a running gag about the small world of the Atlantic Station strip mall, a rap scavenger hunt from beyond the grave, an investigation of the fictional “Crank Dat Curse,” a look at the making of singer D’Angelo and a bevy of black-centric insular themes that felt far removed from season three’s white gaze. Beyond that, the fourth season tapped into an emotional resonance that paid off previous seasons and moved the characters to new places.
Episode two of the fourth season, The homeliest horse, finally answered the question about why Earn had to leave Princeton. It was Glover’s best performance of the season and his monologue explaining the situation was masterfully written. As someone who had a traumatic situation in a majority white institution where I was nearly kicked out (for very different reasons), the episode resonated with me. I have black colleagues who felt the same. The episode was set in Earn’s therapy session, a moment rarely seen on TV where a black male therapist and his black male patient are working through trauma together, which deepens anger, anxiety and the meanness The show isn’t depressing though, as the ending is as twisted as it is hilarious. (Don’t worry, I won’t ruin it for you.)
Guy D’Alema/FX
Work ethic it’s the funniest episode in the show’s history. Making fun of Tyler Perry is already old-fashioned. the boondocks did the same thing over a decade ago, but atlanta it took the story to the absurd in a way that I wouldn’t even be surprised if Perry himself enjoyed it. I mean, how could he not laugh at the idea that his scripts flow from a chaotic piano script maker or that he’s developed an immunity to hot beans? And like many of the other non-season three episodes, the writing leaves the audience to their own conclusions about morality. But it’s undeniable that Perry works ridiculously fast and the comedy in it was enough to warrant his own episode of him.
The showpiece of the season, and perhaps the best episode of the entire series, is a mockumentary about the creation of Disney. a silly movie, which has been embraced by blacks as the blackest Disney film of all time. The episode exists in a world where a black man accidentally became the CEO of Disney and infiltrated the company with a super noir movie filled with subliminal nods to the way white supremacy has terrorized marginalized people. aptly titled The fool who sat by the doora nod to Sam Greenlee’s 1968 novel, the episode was so well done that several people made sure it wasn’t real.
The most rewarding part of the end of atlanta it’s the show’s way of answering long-standing questions and bringing rewarding conclusions to many of the character arcs. Earn and Vanessa’s relationship had been one of the most complex on television in recent years, as the two navigated co-parenting and general emotional unavailability. A camping trip finally saw them accept the status of their union as two people deeply in love but deeply terrified of what that love would mean. It’s probably the most comprehensive story ever told about Van, a character who has sadly been emblematic of the show’s one glaring shortcoming.
atlanta I never really knew what to do with black women. From the episode “Champagne Papi” in season two that features a scene where a black woman turns into a mad bitter person because a white woman is “taking” black men, to the episode “Lightskinned-ed” that made the women in Earn’s family come across as petty and vapid schemers, many of the black women on the show were caricatures never given proper depth. “Snipe Hunt,” which resolved Earn and Van’s relationship, took steps to rectify these issues, but rewatching the entire series will always reveal that glaring blemish.
However, everything else in season four was stellar. The season finale raised the idea that each episode had been a figment of Darius’s imagination from time spent in a sensory deprivation chamber. Darius, played with subtle brilliance by Stanfield, has become one of the most fascinating characters on television, an absurdity wrapped in a disturbance. He had been experiencing traumatic events on the periphery, ignoring them like nothing, until we saw him dealing with it all in the series finale doing everything he could to convince himself that his entire life was being played out in his imagination. . He’s an unexpectedly relatable wrinkle to the Darius character.
At the end of the series, atlanta it had given us a fully constructed alternate version of the city that already exists as a fantasy world in the minds of so many blacks. On the way to the world atlanta built, we got in-depth character analysis of four of television’s most dynamic figures. What started the year as a third season disaster turned into a final season that is as good as any that aired in all of 2022. I know a lot of people left the show after season three, but it would be okay. atlantaand to yourselves, it is a disservice not to see the vision through to the end.
