Having reached the conclusion of the fourth and final season, I'm in a position to review "Atlanta" Donald Glover's inspired, eccentric, brilliant ... sitcom (I guess). Though starting with a relatively straight forward narrative, the shows use of bottle episodes, diversions and flights of fancy make for a truly memorable experience.
Earnest Marks (Donald Glover) drops out of Princeton and returns home to Atlanta. His cousin Alfred (Brian Tyree Henry) has been earning some local acclaim rapping under the name "Paper Boi". Though initially wary of his help, Earn slowly earns Paper Boi's trust and eventually becomes his manager. Together with their friend Darius (LaKeith Stanfield) and Earn's sometime girlfriend Vanessa (Zazie Beetz) they struggle to negotiate the hip-hop scene, America, and the World.
What I liked about "Atlanta" might be something that other people disliked about it; in that it's not really interested in what might have been its own central story. If you want to follow their rise to stardom, then I'm afraid you'll be disappointed. You can tell that Paper Boi becomes a celebrity, but again more based on where they are and what they're doing, rather than seeing each stage of his star rising. The first season is perhaps more dedicated to that story than any of the other three are, but it very quickly starts to tell stories more about the African American experience, rather than specifically about these characters, indeed there are several episodes across the run where they don't feature at all.
The third season sees them leave Atlanta for a tour of Europe and has some interesting faces appearing in the show, from an English point of view, including Sean Gilder and Aaron Heffernan. It's the strange ideas that take it over the top for me, concepts such as shopping malls you can't escape from, looping dream sequences and elseworld history.
Though it's often an authentic exploration of relatively deep issues such as racism, it's repeatedly and genuinely funny with it and I'd absolutely recommend it.
