Atlanta: Why you need to be watching Donald Glover’s new FX series

It captivates right from the pilot

The first I saw of Atlanta was its Instagram teaser, and, like all Instagram teasers, I guess, it was heavy on aesthetics, leading me to worry that the show would be filled with beautiful composed, washed-out shots but not much substance.

It belied an incredibly thoughtful series, though, that has been the first to really grab me right from the pilot this year (yes, that includes Stranger Things and The Girlfriend Experience).

In Atlanta, Donald Glover has written a love song to his hometown (he was born in Stone Mountain, so close enough) that has just a crazy amount of charm.

Serving as creator, executive producer and star, and having written most of the episodes, he plays Earn, an overgrown kid smart enough for college and yet a dropout, too smart for jail and yet occasionally in the system. Serving as the de facto manager of his trapper cousin Paper Boi just as he starts getting heat, Earn has an interesting, detached relationship with Atlanta and its residents; I’m reminded of that Kendrick lyric: “I’m not on the outside looking in / I'm not on inside looking out / I’m in the dead fucking centre looking around.”

Atlanta hits many different emotional notes in its first two episodes, which were released back to back last week. There’s laugh out loud comedy but also The Wire-rivalling drama with regards to the futility of policing. Crucially, it feels balanced too. It doesn’t embrace trap music as the pinnacle of human achievement but nor does it sneer at Paper Boi and his simplistic beats and bars.

To the bitesize news, trending guest verse-consuming masses, Atlanta is just Magic City strip club and trap houses, but Glover rejects this, apparently having even batted down the network’s suggestion that he incorporate more of the latter into the show. It instead focuses more on the lonely moments in between all the parties and studio sessions and music video shoots, and I’m not talking introspective verses about how lonely it is at the top - it’s the kind of show where a rapper might be stunting one minute then calmly making a sandwich the next and trying to come up with a non-boring tweet to fire off to his fans.

I feel a bond to Atlanta’s central characters already and we’re only two episodes in. If it can sustain for the rest of the season we might have one of, if not the, best new show this year.