There Was No Sense of Closure to the Series Finale of Atlanta. That's Why It Was The Perfect Ending

 

 

When Donald Glover’s Atlanta debuted in the fall of 2016, it was recognized as one of the great critical sensations of the era of Peak TV. Glover won the Golden Globe and the Emmy for Best Actor in a Comedy in 2017, and the show won numerous prizes, including Best Comedy/Musical from the Golden Globes that year. When it’s second season debuted in March of 2018, it seemed to take its place among the greatest series of all time, with one Entertainment Weekly critic ranking it the best show of 2018.

Then COVID happened and its been four years since we got Season 3. Ever since it debuted this March and as the final season aired in September, while critics have generally showered praise upon Atlanta, even the biggest boosters of it have considered something of a disappointment. I’ve never been one of those critics, and fundamentally think that collectively the final two seasons of the show will earn a place for Atlanta on my year’s ten best list – perhaps even in the Top Five.  I do, however, fundamentally understand why so many fans of the show think it has lost its way in the last two seasons.

When Atlanta debuted in the fall of 2016, it seemed prescient in how it anticipated the picture of what much of America and Black America in particular would be like in the next several years. It had a fundamental grasp of what it was like to be poor and struggling in the South, how disconnected from reality the average black person was, how even success had it own pratfalls. But because Paperboi’s (Bryan Tyree Henry) rise to superstardom essentially happened off-screen, the average viewer was able to spend much of the second season assuming that Earn (Glover) Alfred and everyone around him were still the same people they’d been when we first met them. Even if you assumed that they were richer and more successful, because even the most successful black Americans exist on the fringes of society anyway, you could still assume they were the same. When the European tour that dominated Season 3 became the center of it, it became much harder to deny that. Success fundamentally didn’t change any of the central characters – all four leads were essentially more or less the same people we met in the first season even at the series finale – but it’s a rule of television that it is easier to root for the underdog than the successful person. Glover himself went out of his way to make this clear in the second part of the season premiere, when he went out of his way to execute a form of revenge so petty against an airport security officer he thought had wronged her that when Alfred and Darius learned about it, even they admitted he’d gone over the edge. (The episode ends with Earn saying: “I’ve got to go back into therapy.” There’s no evidence he ever did, which is fitting for the show.)

The other reason that so many fans and critics rebelled during Season 3 was, of course, all of the standalone episodes we ended up getting that had nothing to really do with the characters we met.  I had no problem with any of these episodes – I’d argue that ‘Three Slaps’ and ‘Trini From the Block’ are as good as anything I’ve seen this year. But by the time the penultimate episode aired, and it was yet another stand alone this time in black and white,  I don’t blame so many viewers for starting to get fed up. I was never one of them, and now I’ll explain why.

The highpoint of Atlanta as a series, it is universally agreed, is ‘Teddy Perkins’. Glover’s master class of an episode in which Darius (Lakeith Stanfield) goes to pick up a piano at a house and finds himself greeting by Perkins (Glover in an uncredited and unrecognizable role) who says the house has become a museum to a reclusive artist clearly modeled on Michael Jackson. The longer the episode goes on, it’s clear Perkins is this artist, and he has developed this museum as essentially a monument to his tortured youth. The episode stars surreal and keeps getting weirder until it reaches its horrifying conclusion.

To be clear, this episode was a masterpiece and the fact that it lost the Emmy for Glover both as a writer and as an actor is almost a travesty.  (I say almost because he lost to Bill Hader, whose work as an actor and writer for Barry has been one of the great masterpieces of television as well.  And as good as Glover was, I fundamentally was rooted for Amy Sherman-Palladino to take home an Emmy for her work on Marvelous Mrs. Maisel. There were a lot of good comedies that year.) But the longer I watched it, the more I began to question the fundamental reality of what I was watching. Glover and his writers had consistently given is a surreal picture of the world throughout the first two seasons, but I’m kept waiting for the moment that this was revealed as a hallucination or a dream, something that made this utterly bizarre world make sense. It never did, we just accepted that this was what happened. But I think this fundamental disconnect made it easier for me to accept what was going on in Atlanta primarily in the third season and quite a bit in the fourth.

From the Season 3 premiere on, I fundamentally questioned the reality of everything I saw. I think Glover, Hiro Murai and his writers were steering into that particular idea for most of the third season. The core message of Atlanta the first two seasons had been that the world the characters lived in made no sense, so why should that be any different for the rest of the world?  I went with the standalones because they were brilliantly written, and while none of the characters were in them, you could just as easily see this as the kind of thing that would happen in this world. This became increasingly clear on the European tour.  Sometimes what we saw wasn’t real, as we saw very clearly in the exceptional ‘New Jazz’ episode when Alfred went on a drug trip and ended up in a bar with Liam Neeson. Sometimes it was real, but there was no explanation as we saw in the tour de force season 3 finale when we finally caught up with Van (Zazie Beetz was robbed of an Emmy nomination) who seemed to have taken on an entirely new character and personality (stuffing coke on Alexander Skarsgard’s underwear was only the start of the weirdness) only to come out of it at the end. We got an explanation for what was going on with Van in that episode and all season, but not the rest of what we had seen. In the easter egg at the end of the season finale, there seemed to be a moment that connected everything we’d seen this year to reality. I imagine many people were hoping that Glover and his writers would tie this in this season. They never did, never even got back to it. I was slightly disappointed, but not surprised.

The same level of surrealness continued throughout Season 4. I’ve gone over some of the biggest shocks in the first three episodes of the season, so I’ll go over some of the other major ones. Van took her five year old daughter to the studios of ‘Mr. Chocolate’ where she was cast as an extra. (Glover didn’t even bother to hide that this was a Tyler Perry satire and how little respect that he and so many other African-Americans feels for him.) Her daughter said a line on the set, and Mr. Chocolate, simply a disembodied voice, cast her as an extra. Van spent the rest of the episode watching as her daughter was maneuvered out of her reach as she shot to superstardom in series and movies so racist that they make ‘Song of the South’ look like 12 Years A Slave.  Van finally managed to save her daughter (I’ll leave the details to you) but by the end, it was hard to know if she wanted to be save.

Alfred spent one episode learning about ‘The Crunk Killer’, a man who was killing people who did YouTube versions of the Crunk when they were children, something he thought of as a joke – but it clearly wasn’t. Earn and Darius spent the same portion of the episode trying to buy a black market set of sneakers, only to learn the seller’s price was that they kiss. This climaxed at a mall in a scene that seemed out of the Wild West.

There was also the sole standalone a ‘BAN’ documentary (an easter egg reaching back to Season 1) which told the story of Tom Washington, an African-American animator from Atlanta, who ended up drawing for and amazingly running Disney and trying to make The Goofy Movie fundamentally a portrait of the black experience in America.  There is, of course, a dark satire at the core of this, considering that African-Americans have had problems with Disney movies for more than sixty years.

All of this was bizarre, and you really wondered how real was. So it was fitting that the final episode of the series written by Glover and directed by Murai, decided to deliberately lean into this. It was titled ‘It Was All A Dream’. Most of the episode had to do with Darius and his attempt to go a sensory deprivation tank. We spent about two thirds of the episode with him, and all of that time, like him, utterly unsure just how real everything was.

 He ran into an old girlfriend who was drinking when she picked up and she was pulled over by a white cop. I think everybody watching went to the same place I did: they were going to end series by having Darius killed like so many other that African-Americans. Would it have been bleak? No question. But I think the writers would have gotten credit for it. But Glover and Murai didn’t take the easy way out. Darius’ ex passed the sobriety test…and  then stole the cop’s gun. Then they hit a cyclist and she jumped out of the car.

And Darius woke up in the tank. Then it seemed like that he was in a dream again, considering the repetition of tea and being in a room with a bunch of white ladies who did look suspicious alike. He got thrown out thinking it was a fake. He went to his brother’s house, who to the point we’ve never met. He gives him some meds, then began to cry talking about his parents, then his eyes turn to TV…and he wakes up in the tank. Twice.

Meanwhile, Alfred, Earn and Van are in a black owned sushi-fusion restaurant built in an old Blockbuster – across from a Popeye’s Chicken. They spend the entire meal wanting to get out and eat the chicken sandwiches before the owner – the Louis Farrakhan equivalent of a sushi chef – delivers a brutal monologue about sushi, Popeyes, and the separatism of black people. At the end of this monologue, he demands that Alfred eat blowfish, which he has remarked repeatedly might kill him. Things look bleak and then the owner says: “Lock the doors.” Darius drives up in a convertible, punches everybody out, and rescues everybody. They drive off into the sunset, eating chicken sandwiches.

Then comes the coda where Darius tells him he stole the car he rescued them with. Everyone looks at him incredulously, and he says its’ fine: “Cause I’m still in the tank.” Everyone tries to reassure them that he’s not, but we’re not sure he believes them. Everyone goes on to the balcony to get high, but Darius stares at the TV which has an image of Judge Judy on it. Like Inception, this is Darius’ top. The episode – and the series – end with him staring at the TV.

I have little doubt that people will be dissatisfied with this ending. I’d argue that it’s the perfect note to end Atlanta on. For the majority of the series, we’ve come to utterly distrust everything we see as some version of the unreliable narrator. Why should the ending be any different? Were you expecting some kind of natural ending? Nothing about Atlanta has played in the world of realism. That’s the reason it’s one of the greatest shows ever made.  There’s a good argument that Glover and his writers are making the statement that the world of Atlanta is exactly what it’s like to be black. The world is filled with peril, known and unknown, no one you meet is fully trustworthy, and you can never be sure when the rug is going to be pulled out from under you. Anyone who has lived through the last decade -  whatever race, gender, or orientation they are – would have a hard time denying that’s pretty much what the world has been like for all of us.

I think Atlanta is a masterpiece. It’s the kind of show such versatile artists as Bunuel, David Lynch and Jordan Peele would recognized and respect.  Like their works, it will always be an acquired taste but that’s what Peak TV is all about. FX has been ground zero for some of the most revolutionary comedies of the last decade: from What We Do In the Shadows to Better Things to Breeders. All of them, though brilliant, were somewhat traditional. There’s nothing traditional about Atlanta. Glover had a brilliant career before this show and a spectacular career now. But even if he ever returns to comedy or FX, he’ll never create another show quite like Atlanta. Though I wouldn’t mind if he tried.

MY SCORE: 5 stars.