The following article contains spoilers forAtlanta.
Hollywood has a penchant for making more and more of whatever works and it’s that very premise that rendersAtlanta’sthird season all the more puzzling. Perhaps it’s a symptom of how much time has passed since the show first aired back in 2016 and this new season coming four years apart from the previous one, but if there’s one statement to draw from it is that Donald Glover, Hiro Murai, and company sure don’t care for formulas of any kind.
Sure,Atlanta’sbrand ofcomedyhas always flirted with surrealism and existentialist themes to portray the Black experience in America, however, mere courtship is not wasn’t enough for the show as it headed to European shores where it found new arthouse influences to turn itself into something really unlike any other TV production today. That it does it all as incredibly mainstream television is a massive win forAtlanta, especially since it executes this using a pretty non-standard medium, the bottle episode.
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Black Arthouse Television
Arthouse cinema from filmmakers like Akira Kurosawa, Michelangelo Antonioni, Ingmar Bergmanand YouTuber David Lynchis made differently from most Hollywood movies — whereas traditional films look to entertain, these more artsy counterparts seek to explore deeply intellectual ideas and aesthetic values, often creating motif or traditions later embraced by modern medialike, sayGhost of Tsushima. IsAtlantafully arthouse? Not even close, as the series gladly caters to its humor roots and still successfully delivers character progression for its main cast.
Nevertheless, it achieves this by means of correlation instead of causation in a season where the main cast is absent for exactly half the episodes and the individual character arcs often are relegated to the background of what’s usually going on, whether it’sZazie Beetz starring in her own version ofAmélieorAl’s trippy encounter with Liam Neeson. Of course, these aren’t the finest examples of this, it’s more controversial and thoughtful episodes like “The Big Payback” and its take on reparations that are the real playing ground for these ideas to blossom.
Glover hasn’t named any specific influencesto what led him to steerAtlanta’sthird season this way, but he has mentioned he sees each new part of the series as a concept album. IfAtlanta’ssecond season was “Robbin’ Season”, then the latest one (officially unnamed) it’s the Bottle Season or the artsy one.
Simply put, there is no other show on TV nowadays (certainly not one as popular) immersing itself in this approach, not that many would be able to get away with it from the get-go. Quite possibly, the latest example, though in a radically different direction, was Aziz Ansari’sMaster of Nonein 2017, when the show purposely initiated unsuspecting viewers on Italian arthouse cinema before chronicling the suffering of a Black lesbian couple.
Black And White
Suffice to say, definingAtlanta’sthird season from the perspective of its cinematic values is going the extra mile to attempt something not even Stephen and Donald Glover pretend to do. In their own words, season three was about “the curse of whiteness", seen many times through the scope of white individuals who either criminally or innocently tried to navigate the tides of racial divide and disparity in their own way.
“Rich Wigga, Poor Wigga"slightly touches upon school violence from marginalized kids, while “Cancer Attack” sees Paper Boi become a diversity ambassador for a company that could not be less interested in aiding the social causes he wants to champion.“The Old Man and the Tree”is possibly the funniest episode to come out of thisAtlantaseason, and yet it leaves room to lambast white guilt and privilege, as well as how these two are seen from the eyes of Black folks, even someone as charming as Darius.
Atlanta’sbest episodes are incredibly funny, just ask “Teddy Perkins”, but they can also be very unsettling because oftentimes they are made to lighten up some rather dense topics. Bottle episodes are perfect for this, hence why it’s suddenly OK to live in a world where any white person could owe millions of dollars to a random Black family or why Van can assault someone with a stale baguette in the same episode where people are eating human flesh.
The bigger ideasAtlantais trying to convey this season are that Europe can be racist in its own ways, though certainly less so; that colorism is a thing among Black Americans; that in the wake of protests related to police brutality, Atlanta dutifully never forgets that there’s no better proof of Blackness than getting shot by a cop. More than ever the series gets to explore new facets of the Black experience, not only in the United States, but seen through mostly white lenses, something Glover has said required doing a lot of homework.
From a narrative standpoint,Atlantatransforms its characters, it leaves no room for guessing that Earn, Al, Van and Darius will all be very different people in season 4, more explicitly for Van sure, but less so for Earn who finally doesn’t have money as his main life concern.Atlantadoes it all in season 3, and the true magic behind it is how at times the show looks like it’s doing absolutely nothing, maybe a bit likeSeinfeldbut prettie and evoking a real sense of emotion, as all art should be and -according to Glover- how television should be.
