Thanks to scheduling conflicts and COVID-19, Atlanta has been off the airwaves for four years, an unusually long amount of time even at a time when TV shows routinely take longer between seasons. Of course, it kicks off its return tonight with a standalone episode focused on a character we’ve never seen before. Donald Glover’s unique 35mm creation, even in its earliest episodes when it still set a rhythm, was never particularly committed to established conventions. But “Three Slaps,” the season three premiere, feels less like a provocation and more like an affirmation of the show’s identity.
We last left Earn (Glover), Al (Brian Tyree Henry) and Darius (LaKeith Stanfield) in 2018 when they left for a European tour. Earn had re-secured his place as Als’ manager by putting a gun in the headliner’s pocket at airport security. The next glimpse of any of them isn’t until the very end of “Three Slaps,” and there’s no indication of where they might be or how much time has passed. As if to underscore how little the show is connected to any of its three leads — or to Van (Zazie Beetz), who was last heard via text message about possibly moving back in with her mother — the majority of the episode is spent on a boy named Loquareeous (Christopher Farrar). He messes up in class, sparking a series of ill-fated interventions by would-be rescuers that land him in a frightening foster family.
The Atlanta standalone episodes were also its standout features. Season 1’s “BAN” conjured up an entire TV block, including fake commercials, to showcase Al’s testy performance on a talk show after a tweet about Caitlyn Jenner caused dust around the internet. “Teddy Perkins” sent Darius to a suburban mansion for a free piano in season two, only to find himself in the increasingly troubling company of an eccentric former child star (played by Glover in prosthetics and Whiteface). But even the simpler episodes of the series have taken more of the form of encapsulated narratives as the show has progressed. If Atlanta began with a premise that, stripped down to its basic elements — a nerdy dude managing his rapper cousin — could easily have been the stuff of a sitcom, the show has increasingly rejected the idea of being situational at all.
Midway through season one, Atlanta left the boys behind for “Value,” which followed Van through a night out with a high-flying girlfriend and all morning after as she desperately tries to avoid a mandatory drug test at work. “The Club” and “Juneteenth” embraced the concept of the bottle sequence by rooting themselves in specific settings — a nightclub where Al has a paid gig and an upscale party where Earn and Van pretend to be traditional married couples , rather than two people having a child in an otherwise messy, ill-defined relationship. The second season offers more digressions than classic sequels like this phantasmagorical journey to Helen for Mardi Gras, Al’s Haircut Odyssey and Van’s Night at Drake’s Party. There really isn’t a “normal” episode of the show that spent its second season purposefully detaching itself from its apparent protagonist, Earn, and only backed away from his perspective towards the end of the season.
“Three Slaps” may be Atlanta’s most far-reaching detour to date, but it has many connections to what came before it. It starts with a discussion within a discussion, a scene of two men fishing at night in Loquareeou’s (or Earn’s) nightmare and talking about the lake they’re swimming on being supposedly haunted. While the body of water remains unnamed, it’s clearly Lake Lanier, a reservoir that covers Oscarville’s former black community, and when hands reach out of the darkness to grab one of the characters, it gives details of Earn’s dream back to Van Described at the beginning of the series. “I think it’s about society,” he said at the time. Loquareeous’s snoozing on his desk is reminiscent of “FUBU,” which looked back to Earn’s middle school days and the time when a new shirt almost made him someone who was going to be daft for the rest of his academic life. In this episode, one of Earn’s classmates, Denisha, becomes involved with a teacher after being called out for bowing her own head, and is later seen enthusiastic and engaged after going on an off-screen journey.
Loquareeous’ surreal today’s adventure in foster care might as well be a sideways attempt to fill in what might have happened between those two scenes. His upset mother doesn’t understand why the school wants to pathologize his behavior by sending him to remedial classes instead of just disciplining him. “My son isn’t stupid – he’s an idiot,” she says, but when a desperate counselor sees his grandfather handing down the title penalty, she sends social services and he ends up in the care of the steely Gayle (Jamie). Neumann) and the watery Amber (Laura Dreyfuss), a squishy lesbian couple who brew their own kombucha, make their own soap, and employ their foster parents, who are all black, for handicrafts and branding at the farmer’s market. The episode revolves around the havoc that white institutions can wreak in the name of protecting children in the lives of households of color in general, and the tragedy of the Hart family in particular. But it’s also, like much of Atlanta, just an absurdist nightmare about what passes for normal, a fugue of microwaved drumsticks, threatening phone calls, and mounting menace.
“Three Slaps” airs Thursday nights alongside “Sinterklaas is Coming to Town,” which catches up with the leads, or at least the men, and gives the season a kick-off that’s not entirely and alienatingly radical. But this return suggests that Atlanta is, at its core, an anthology series, one that has a core set of characters that it can approach from different angles and in different combinations, or veer away from altogether. It’s a show about Earn and Al and Darius and Van and all the people they meet along the way, but the stories it wants to tell aren’t all, or even most, linear. What Atlanta captures is Black in America, set to be cast in an ongoing horror comedy – the only genre that can make sense of the experience.
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