AS HE DRIVES away from a coffee shop, Marshall Johnson (played by Justin Bartha) is trailed by a mysterious turquoise car. It pulls up at his house, he answers the door—and is served with a reparations claim. His ancestors were slave-owners and, amid a rippling restitution push, Marshall’s life unravels. Colleagues frantically take DNA tests to prove they are of blameless stock. “I’m Peruvian,” his estranged wife declares. “You were white yesterday,” he replies.
Unsettling, funny and deadly serious, episode four in the third and latest season of “Atlanta” is—at least for white viewers—a kind of satirical anxiety dream. Neither Donald Glover, the show’s creator and lead actor, nor its other regular stars appear. These surprises are to be expected. Since it first aired in 2016, “Atlanta” has conducted an escalating experiment in form, even as it crafts an offbeat exposé of poverty and racial injustice. The perfect fit between method and message makes it a powerful and original work of art.
At first, the show felt like a sitcom—if Samuel Beckett and James Baldwin had written one together. Mr Glover is Earn, a Princeton drop-out whose cousin Alfred (Brian Tyree Henry) raps under the name Paper Boi. Earn wants to be his manager and has a child with Van (Zazie Beetz). Alfred has a trippy, philosophical housemate called Darius (LaKeith Stanfield). From the start, “Atlanta” dispensed with the niceties of exposition and tired machinery of plot. Banality bled into surrealism and hallucination: an invisible car, a bow-tied shaman on a bus.
Things spiralled from there. An entire episode consisted of a mock talk show on which Paper Boi argued with a white activist about trans rights in a dizzying, multifaceted satire; a spoof news report featured a black teenager who identified as a 35-year-old white man. In the second season Darius was trapped in a Gothic mansion by a psychopathic music legend who resembled Michael Jackson. The gun Earn acquired in the season premiere went off in the finale, but not as Chekhov might have predicted.
The guiding principle of “Atlanta” seems to be never to compromise with the executives at FX, the network that commissioned it, nor with the audience (in Britain the latest series will be available on Disney+). After a four-year hiatus, the new run opens with two unknown men fishing on a haunted lake; most of the first episode tells the tale of a black child adopted by a pair of sinister white women.
The content is as discomforting as the form. Mostly the villains are not frothing bigots but presumptuous white liberals, like the condescending host of a Juneteenth party in season one. The microaggressions add up, though. Gatekeepers in “Atlanta” will admit its black characters only on soul-crushing, pigeonholing terms. Charm and talent are not enough, and nor, for Earn and Van, is love. Their mistakes count triple; small gains are liable to be snatched back. The humour is less laugh or cry than both at once.
Even success isn’t enough, it turns out. Like the actors—above all Mr Glover, not only a “Star Wars” hero but, as Childish Gambino, an internet-breaking musician—in season three the characters have made it and are touring Europe. But good fortune is less an escape than a new kind of trap. In Amsterdam they stumble into a blackface winter festival. At a party in London, an off-key remark is a chance for white onlookers to perform their piety. Racism, the show insists, transcends borders and bank accounts.
The drama’s elastic shape, and a mood both urgent and woozily dreamlike, work because they reflect the unstable conditions that “Atlanta” depicts. If you stop to think about it, the story’s surreal moments are no crazier than its everyday indignities, not least the violence that throbs at its margins, often perpetrated by police. The narrative digressions mirror the involuntary detours in lives that are short on autonomy. When mundane errands can lead to disaster, as they do for Alfred and Earn, or a day can begin as screwball comedy and lurch into horror, established genres won’t do.
Except perhaps one. The basic template in “Atlanta”—in which fantasy and reality blur, anything can happen yet the ending seems predetermined—is the fairy tale. As with the consoling repetitions of the sitcom, fairy tales run on a loop, but sometimes the effect is nightmarish. Like Hansel and Gretel, Mr Glover’s characters keep getting stuck—in a spooky forest, mazy nightclub or depraved frat house. They search for a way out, but sense that there isn’t one. They are caught in a story written long ago.
Read more from Back Story, our column on culture:
Ukraine’s most famous rock star is singing for victory (Apr 2nd)
Disavow some Russian artists. Don’t cancel Russian art (Mar 19th)
In a resonant staging of “Henry V”, war is murder in uniform (Mar 5th)