The critics and ratings are with me. Donald Glover’s surreal dramady Atlanta needs to walk away with an Emmy for Outstanding Comedy Series – to start.
Donald Glover deserves every award ever made and fathomed by man. I may be wildly biased, but the critics are on my side and so are the record-breaking ratings.
The universe can start by awarding him an Emmy for Atlanta, his brilliant “Twin Peaks for Rappers” that is up for nearly every Outstanding Comedy award. As the creator, protagonist, occasional writer, and director, it is impossible to lobby for the FX show without arguing for Donald Glover — and vice versa.
I was introduced to Glover through the cult-favorite comedy Community, where he played Troy, a dumb jock who lost his chance at football scholarship due to a keg stand-related injury. In a comedy, everyone character is funny, but only Troy was surprising. I could predict what he’d say but never the way he would deliver it, whether it was his quirky cadence or off-kilter gestures.
He retains that element of surprise in Atlanta through the contrast of intense scenes, deep reflections on life, and then one of a man holding a knife in one hand and a plate of freshly baked cookies in the other. You never know what’s coming or how it will play out.
The FX show follows protagonist Earnest “Earn” Marks, a twenty-something who is severely down on his luck. Maybe some people are just born to lose, he muses to a mystically creepy stranger on the bus (who later demands Earn take a bite out of his Nutella sandwich, as if it’s communion).
Call it the loser’s limbo. Earn has places to crash but nowhere to live, occasionally staying with Vanessa, the mother of his child. They share a bed but not a life, affectionate one moment only for Vanessa to announce that she has a date in the next. He’s employed but broke, a Princeton alum on a three-year gap year with no end in sight. But when he hears that his cousin Alfred is blowing as rapper Paper Boi, he sees a way out and offers to be his manager — to mixed results. The series follows them as they navigate the dark comedy of Atlanta and the rap scene.
You might call it misadventures, but it’s a bit of an understatement in a show where the first scene has a gunshot reverberating in a liquor store parking lot. Later in the same episode, Alfred’s endearingly spacey friend Darius thoughtfully considers the world-changing effects of turning a rat into a phone.
Written by Glover’s brother Stephen, “Streets on Lock” earned an Outstanding Writing nomination, and it’s something else. Alfred and Earn are suspects in shooting over a broken rear-view mirror. But the truth is hazy to the viewer, and the victim is nowhere to be found. Earn spends the night in a precinct, waiting to be processed into the system so he can be bailed out. He sits uncomfortably sandwiched between a man chatting with his (unbeknownst to him) is trans ex-girlfriend. “Stop being weird!,” he continually yells at a silent Earn.
Minutes later, the waiting room laughs as a mentally ill man aimlessly dances and sips on toilet water. The cops are friendly to him as if he’s just a silly character until the man spits water at one of them. An officer whips out a baton and beats the man to the ground.
The viewer is startled and shocked into attention, yet surprisingly still grounded in the scene. We stay in the weird world of the precinct waiting room because, tragically, it isn’t strange at all. This is reality. Mental illness is ignored and contemptibly diminished into “quirky” hijinks until it’s too late. Jail is a revolving door home for people in desperate need of treatment.
It is a literal blow-by-blow breakdown of society’s treatment of the mentally ill, homeless, police brutality, excess force, and a small, painful glimpse into the heart of the Black Lives Matter movement. All that covered in a scene that is less than a minute and a half long. Talk about economic writing.
As Molly Castro, production assistant at MRC Media told me, an Emmy win means more than just an award for a great show. “He should win an Emmy because he has such a powerful voice for people of color and we need more stories like this,” she said.
Speaking to the Television Critics Association, Glover said he wanted to “show viewers what it’s like to be black.” It’s a tall order for anyone, he admitted. But he rises to the occasion. Atlanta provides a prism-like view that reveals the spectrum of the black experience, from everyday obstacles to systemic racism so pervasive, you may not even notice it until you watch Atlanta.
Next: The dark-horse-only Emmy ballot
To somehow find and convey the surreal humor around it, that’s just art.