Atlanta Fourth Season Review

After a short European tour, the quartet of the main characters returns to their native Atlanta. Earn (Donald Glover) remembers the reason for his expulsion from the university and tries to build a relationship with Wen (Zazie Beetz), Al Bancila / Paper Boi (Brian Tyree Henry) realizes that he has finally achieved popularity, but is not very happy about it, but his eternally relaxed friend Darius (Lakeith Stanfield) is trying to figure out where the line between dream and reality lies.

After a four-year hiatus, Atlanta returned with two final seasons six months apart. The third, released in the spring, began for health, but rather quickly turned into a self-parody and ended for the rest. The absurd adventures of heroes maneuvering between European capitals alternated with vignettes from the lives of strangers. In isolated episodes, viewers saw not always convincing stories about how the racial issue affects the formation of identity. Here, for example, is a horror story about two white feminists who recruited black adopted children from an orphanage and committed mass suicide; here is a satire about a mestizo teenager who considers himself white, but for the sake of a free education, he tries to prove that he belongs to the African American community; here is a drama about a white man who loves a Trinidadian nanny more than his parents; and here is a parable about a poor fellow who is cursed with “whiteness” and is forced to pay reparations for the fact that his ancestor owned slaves. It sounds like classic Atlanta, but in reality, most of the episodes will easily fall into the antitope of the series: these are fillers overloaded with social criticism, which lacked the former comedic lightness, inconsistency and pungency.

After the third season, it seemed that Atlanta, although it had not outlived itself, seemed to have lost its unique ability to keep abreast and diagnose the country with the most incoherent set of sounds and gestures. In the first seasons, after all, there were no highbrow conclusions and unambiguous comments – only surreal sketches and ridiculous gags that showed the viewer the frustration of the black population from life in modern America. Go figure out what exactly the creators want to say. Fortunately, lightness and ambiguity returned in the fourth – and final – season, which will easily compete with the second for the title of the best in the history of the series. This is indeed a kind of greatest hits set, in which the heroes finally return to Atlanta, and the season of the year, as in the very first episodes, is again replaced by summer.

I would like to repeat and recall the words of Donald Glover, who first said that the final seasons of Atlanta would be the best in the history of television and be compared only with The Sopranos, and also compared the seasons with Kanye West albums. As for the first one, we can say that this is probably not entirely true, but let time finally decide. But the second comment opens an interesting discussion about the sources of inspiration for the creators. If you think about it, there are indeed parallels: the debut album The College Dropout rhymes with the story of Ern, who dropped out of the university; Late Registation is an attempt to gain a foothold in the industry with a product atypical for it (by the way, the same can be said about the creators!), Graduation is Banchila’s European tour and self-awareness as a star. The fourth album, the insanely influential 808s & Heartbreak, also hit here – death, therapy, personal tragedy and an attempt to sort out relationships. Probably, this information is optional for most viewers, but it only once again proves that an innovative project can be created only at the intersection of mediums and under the influence of something alien at first glance.

In the era of streaming, where every other drama series can afford to experiment with narrative (reimagined bottled episodes or episodes entirely dedicated to secondary characters), the fourth season of Atlanta does not look as radical as before. Nevertheless, the brainchild of Glover managed to retire with his head held high. Firstly, the contrast with the controversial third season affected – it seems that the creators saved the best for last and gave out a series of outstanding episodes. No existential anxiety, just distilled melancholy and absurdity. Even in the fourth season, only once the audience is shown an episode not about the main characters – in the format of a convincingly stylized mockumentary, they tell a fictional story of a black Disney CEO. Allegedly, in the mid-90s, he approved the release of “Goofy Vacation”, because he dreamed of releasing “the blackest cartoon in history.” If desired, the episode can be viewed as a meta-commentary on the legacy of Glover, who, like his alter ego, has long considered himself an outcast (stand-up geek, insufficiently masculine rapper), but still became part of the “culture”.

Finally, what makes the fourth season of Atlanta great is the ambitious open ending, reminiscent of both Inception and the same Sopranos. Viewers are invited to independently draw a line under the previous 40 episodes and decide what it all was: a wild reality or just a dream of Darius. True, this time the interpretation and choice are not so important. After six years on the air, the series is leaving at a time when the level of absurdity of the real world is in no way inferior to the creators’ wildest fantasies. Once again, life imitates art – it seems to be more correct to ask, at what point did we become the heroes of the Atlanta episode?