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As real as a dream | The Economist

http://www.economist.com/news/books-and-arts/21706232-atlanta-donald-glover-brings-original-voice-prestige-television-real?fsrc=scn/fb/te/pe/ed/asrealasadream

As real as a dream Books and arts New American television With “Atlanta”,
Donald Glover brings an original voice to prestige television

Sep 3rd 2016

ONE of the shortcomings of this platinum age of television is that it is
still predominantly white. There are more good shows with minority
characters in important roles, but most stories are still told from the
white point of view.

“Atlanta”, which starts on September 6th on FX in America, introduces an
important new voice to “prestige TV”. Donald Glover, the creator and star,
is familiar to audiences as a comic actor (appearing in “Community”, a
television show, and in “The Martian”, a film), and as a hip-hop performer
with the stage name Childish Gambino. The show he has made is funny,
eccentric and thought-provoking. It is also groundbreaking television: not
just because it explores the struggles of a black man in a black world, but
because of how it does so.

Mr Glover plays Earn, a charming young underachiever trying to make
something of himself—and to pay his share of the rent at his child’s
mother’s house. In the first episode, having returned home to Atlanta after
dropping out of Princeton, he discovers his drug-dealing cousin Alfred is
beginning to make a name for himself as a rapper, Paper Boi, and decides to
talk his way into becoming his manager.

What follows is a series of misadventures, the attempted rise of a rapper
and his would-be entourage. Earn is a guy on the make. His father refuses
to let him into his house, giving as his reason, “I can’t afford it.” Paper
Boi, played by Brian Tyree Henry, accuses Earn of trying to get rich from
him. By the end of the first episode, Paper Boi and Earn end up being
arrested after a confrontation where a gun goes off. By the end of the
second, the publicity of the arrest makes Paper Boi a local celebrity, with
echoes of the late Tupac Shakur (another American rapper and record
producer, who was himself arrested in a shooting in Atlanta). It is a
development that the rapper regards as both appealing and disturbing.
Meanwhile, in parallel, Earn spends a long day in jail, a sequence that
manages to serve as both social commentary and absurd entertainment.

The first two episodes (and seven of the season’s ten) are directed by Hiro
Murai, who has collaborated frequently with Mr Glover on music videos. Mr
Murai’s surrealist touch pairs well with Mr Glover’s writing sensibility.
In a mind-bending scene in the first episode, a man in a suit and bow tie
on a bus dispenses wisdom to Earn and urges him to eat a Nutella sandwich,
then disappears, only to reappear outside the bus walking a dog into the
trees—an existential play.

At the same time “Atlanta” feels real and naturalistic, a credit to its
writing and acting. Keith Stanfield steals multiple scenes as Paper Boi’s
trippy sidekick, Darius, usually high on weed and deep in his own head.
When Earn says to Paper Boi that he is not so homeless that he, say, uses a
rat as a telephone, Darius muses aloud how much better the world would be
if people could actually use rats as phones. It would be “messy”, he
concedes, but “everyone would have an affordable phone.”

Alexa Fogel, a casting director who worked on “The Wire”, David Simon’s
acclaimed crime drama series, has assembled a cast of talented character
actors who anchor the show in its eponymous city. In the second episode,
one of the men being held with Earn in jail launches into a monologue, in
amusingly indecipherable Atlanta patois, about how he went out for beers
and ended up getting arrested. This is how “Atlanta” unfolds—characters
speak to each other without the limiting crutch of helping the audience
with context or exposition. We are left to absorb the story, piecing things
together in this world as we follow along with Earn, bemused.

“Atlanta” defies easy categorisation. It is a comedy interested in more
than laughs. It is a hyperrealist study painted with surrealist strokes. It
comes from an original point of view, and it is heading somewhere
intriguing.
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Eric D. Schwerin
eschwerin@rosemontseneca.com

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