‘Atlanta’ Is Back, Four Years Later And Not A Minute Too Soon

It’s kind of impossible to discuss the third season of Atlanta without mentioning how long it’s been since the second season ended, so let’s get that out of the way first, briefly. The second season finale aired on May 10, 2018. Earlier that day, Fox canceled Brooklyn Nine-Nine, which means that show was saved by NBC, aired multiple additional seasons, and then ended again a second time since Atlanta‘s credits most recently rolled. Scandal had just aired its series finale a few weeks earlier. The series finale of The Americans was still about two weeks away, somehow. Disney Plus and HBO Max didn’t even exist yet, and wouldn’t for another year or two. If you hopped in a time machine bound for May 2018 right now and told the first person you saw that you love Baby Yoda, they would justifiably look at you like you had lost it.

There are two points I’m trying to make here. The first point is that, if you have a time machine, please use it for better purposes than this, or at least let me use it, just a little. (I’ll be right back.) The second and much more important point is that, like, it’s been a while.

Which is cool, in a way. Not so much in the “I like to have lots of episodes of the good shows parading into my eyeballs as often as possible” way, sure. But definitely in the way sometimes you have to wait for the good things, because they take time, and you can’t just expect the world to cater to your whims constantly, even though it kind of feels that way lately, what with the massive amount of shows coming out in a massive number of formats every week, giving you everything nownowmorenow. Atlanta is not that, and has never been that. It’s a show that makes you come to it on its terms, not your own, a vast technological future and present be damned. And again… that’s cool. It’s always been a show that zigs when you expect it to zag, and zag when you expect it to zig, and launches itself straight up into the cosmos just when you think you’ve become comfortable with the zigging and zagging. Remember the Teddy Perkins episode? Remember how confused you were at the beginning of that, and throughout the majority of it, and how blown away you were by the end? Yeah. That’s the thing I’m getting at.

FX will assuredly send me a series of urgent emails if I come right out and tell you the things that happen in the first two episodes of the third season that were released to critics, but I think I can get away with saying this: Atlanta is still very much comfortable in subverting your expectations. That becomes clear right away. The show has things it wants to say and isn’t all that concerned if you want to know how Paper Boi’s big European tour went or is currently going. At least not right away. A lesser show would — could — never do this. There would be too many concerns about boring or confusing or frustrating the audience. Atlanta, to its credit, pretty much does not care about that. I have a lot of respect for this.

But let’s back up, again, briefly. The second season ended with Earn (Donald Glover) and Alfred aka Paper Boi (Brian Tyree Henry) and a bunch of other people getting on an airplane after a handgun fiasco in the airport, bound for the European tour I just mentioned. Did they get to Europe? Are they still there? Do other characters from the show pop up for various Europe-based such and such? Hmm. I think this promo image of Zazie Beets (back playing Van, Earn’s ex and the mother of his son) should cover those questions.