Ha ha! Sob. What place for regular TV lolz in 2016, when nobody can afford anything, all our heroes have perished and the world is on fire? Good news! The modern US comedy is here to help, offering an escape from our misery into someone else’s. Louie planted the seed, Girls squatted down and watered it, and now these downbeat half-hours are everywhere, following their own rules about how depressing and uneventful comedy can be. And here we have another peak for the form with the tragic and hilarious, loose and often plain weird Atlanta, which finally airs in the UK this week.
Showrunner and star Donald Glover – AKA Troy the expressive nerd in Community – is Earn, a late-20s loser in the Georgia suburbs. Earn is smart but his millennial non-job in sales doesn’t cover his rent. Van (Zazie Beetz), the mother of his child, only lets him stay with her out of sexual convenience and pity. When Earn’s cousin Alfred (Brian Tyree Henry) achieves local notoriety rapping under the name Paper Boi, Earn spots an opportunity: he’ll be Alfred’s manager. It’s a role that turns out to be akin to managing someone else’s farts with a net.
The United States is thousands of little places, and the best of this new generation of micro-coms have a unique sense of location. Glover, who’s from the Atlanta suburb of Stone Mountain, shows us dark, still streets with none of the dangerous energy of the inner city. This is the slower death of the outskirts. On the upside, such areas have space for eccentrics and absurdity. You know that feeling when you’re cradling your sleeping daughter on a night bus, and the man opposite insists you share his sandwich, and you don’t because, although you’ve failed at life, you’ve not yet hit the level of being fed by bus randoms; but then he vanishes, and perhaps wasn’t there in the first place? No? In Atlanta, woozy vignettes like this feel more natural than punchlines.
But blasts of violence underline that young, black America is on a precipice. Take Earn at the police station, waiting to be bailed and trying not to provoke the screw-ups all around him: edgy farce briefly becomes unbearably sharp when a white cop brutalises a mentally ill suspect. The moment would feel groundbreaking in a drama; being able to swerve into racial politics and back out into comedy – there follows a silly scene where two people in the seats either side of Earn have an intimate chat as if he isn’t there – it’s even more remarkable.
Glover has rejected claims made for his shattering of moulds and capturing of zeitgeists, and Atlanta does have some traditional sitcom bones. Earn is the sane man in the room, forever peering with tired incredulity at buffoons, mainly Alfred’s hanger-on mate Darius (Keith Stanfield), a classic comedy savant full of stoner wisdom, such as his theory that Malcolm X is alive because – hey – since the funeral, nobody’s seen his body! (Earn: “That’s how funerals work.”)
Having fame as his goal gives Earn an endless supply of idiots to cry-laugh at. Like a negative image of Entourage where nothing has gone right instead of everything, the boys drift on the edge of the music scene, bumping into pomposity and corruption whenever they go in. Alfred is already jaded at being even slightly famous, annoyed by his fans and aware that his tough alter ego is a construct. In this world, it’s probably not worth all the bullshit an artist has to cut through to remain authentic. With voices like Glover’s speaking clearly, though, 21st-century sitcom is managing. Let’s cling to that.
Atlanta airs Saturday, 10pm, Fox
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