Atlanta: Donald Glover's Surrealist Masterpiece on Hulu

Hulu is currently streaming all four seasons of Donald Glover’s dramedy series Atlanta, and it’s one of the greatest TV masterpieces of the 21st century so far. Glover first came up as a writer on 30 Rock, and then as a cast member playing the lovable Troy Barnes in Community, but he didn’t emerge as a renowned visionary until he created his own series.

In 2016, Glover teamed up with FX for his own TV vehicle. Glover was the creator, showrunner, star, and occasional director of Atlanta. It’s completely his vision, from top to bottom, and his idiosyncratic voice can be seen all over it. It started off as a pretty traditional dramedy, with a traditional recurring cast, but it quickly evolved into a beast of its own.

Atlanta Is A Modern TV Masterpiece

Over the past couple of decades, we’ve seen the rise of auteur television: TV shows that are so intrinsically tied to their creator’s voice and experiences that no one else could’ve made them. No one other than Lena Dunham could’ve made Girls, no one other than Phoebe Waller-Bridge could’ve made Fleabag, and no one other than Donald Glover could’ve made Atlanta.

Atlanta is a perfect example of an auteur-driven TV show. Glover plays Earnest “Earn” Marks, a college dropout struggling to provide for his daughter, while Brian Tyree Henry plays his cousin, an up-and-coming rapper with the stage name “Paper Boi.” To provide a good life for his kid, Earn sets out to manage his cousin’s music career.

This was a great springboard to explore race, Black culture, and the American Dream, but it was also the perfect satirical vehicle to poke fun at the music industry. Glover uses a surrealist tone to depict the absurdities of the record business. He almost portrays the rap scene of Atlanta as an alternate dimension; a strange world of its own.

Atlanta Kept Evolving Across 4 Seasons

The M.O. of most TV shows is to set up a status quo that will sustain the series for as many years as it’s profitable for the network. The cast of Cheers spent over a decade hanging out in the same bar. The Simpson family has never moved out of Springfield, and the kids haven’t aged a day since 1989.

But Glover took a totally different approach to Atlanta. Atlanta never settled into a status quo or established a repeatable formula. Throughout its four seasons, the show was constantly evolving. In season 3, it left the titular city as the characters embarked on a European tour. The show went to London, Paris, and Amsterdam before coming back to Atlanta.

Glover didn’t just play Earn; he also played a handful of other characters. He donned whiteface to play a deeply disturbing character called Teddy Perkins in a self-titled episode parodying the racial horror of Get Out. He played Kirkwood Chocolate, a film and television mogul who specializes in making entertainment that exploits Black people, in a sharp satire of the industry.

Atlanta has a small handful of overarching storylines, but the show put less and less emphasis on those narrative arcs over time, and instead focused on a more episodic format. In many ways, Atlanta feels like a short story collection. It has a lot of standalone bottle episodes telling self-contained stories with the show’s signature brand of bizarreness.

You’ve never seen another show quite like Atlanta, because no one has ever made another show quite like Atlanta. Glover takes a raw, honest look at the Black experience in contemporary America through the lens of surrealism. Atlanta is one of the weirdest shows you’ll ever see, but it’s also one of the most profound and visually striking shows you’ll ever see.