Atlanta Season 3

Lakeith Stanfield has become one of the buzziest actors in the entire film and television industry, leading movies like Sorry to Bother You, making memorable ...

Atlanta is like a treat, and we'll likely treat Season 3 just like that. All of which is to say: there's 10 episodes of Atlanta on the way, and then 10 more later in 2022 for Season 4, which will be the final season of the show. Season 3 of Atlanta debuts more than four years after Season 2 did, and it'll be exciting to see audiences fall right back into the one-of-a-kind tone that the show sets.

A nightmarish premiere reintroduces Atlanta's penchant for captivatingly strange storytelling. A recap of “Three Slaps,” season 3 episode 1 of FX's 'Atlanta ...

“There spaghetti in there?” he inquires, gesturing toward the fridge. After the white counselor reports Loquareeous’s mother, Atlanta’s Family and Children Services come to the house to do a welfare check with cops in tow, and his mother, indignant and convinced of her son’s hand in reporting her, sends the boy off with the authorities. “I think putting a chicken in the microwave is like the most sanitary thing you could do, plus it doesn’t have all the extra calories from the grease,” Hottie said emphatically, confident in her salmonella serve. “I think he’s just tired,” the officer tells the women. Soon, his mama and grandaddy are called into the school to address his “disruption.” His mother is annoyed and tells the Black principal to instruct the teachers to give him detention like any other kid in trouble. Taking sick pleasure in watching the children toil, she encourages them to sing a song to help them focus on the work. “Don’t worry, I’m gonna get you out of there,” she tells Loquareeous as she walks him back to class. “Yeah, you laughing with them now, but they gon’ be the only ones laughing when you dead or in jail.” The grandfather, a man of few words, steps closer to the boy and slaps him three times across the face. “Loquareeous, sit down,” the teacher shouts over the thunderous classroom as students bang on their desks to give him a beat. As he awakes, the dream of a Black Atlantis is swiftly replaced by the “Change Atlanta” initiative, a program sponsored by the Atlanta Falcons and Domino’s Pizza to “promote my Black history in the curriculum.” The teacher announces that the program’s first field trip will be to see a movie, Black Panther 2. “We’re cursed too,” the white man says as an array of dark-skinned arms ascends from the water, dragging the Black man into its depths. “Town was Black, dude … a self-governing Black town.” The Black man pauses as the information washes over him.

The show's first episode in nearly four years is, as Donald Glover describes it, a “Black fairytale.”

While Devonte’s body has never been recovered, the bodies for five of the children were found at or near the scene, and a death certificate for Devonte (who was 15 at the time) was issued in April of 2019. Devonte’s story is similar to Loquareeous’: after his mother was deemed unfit to care for Devonte, he and three of his siblings went to stay with a paternal aunt, only to be put into the foster system five months later, being placed in the home of Jennifer and Sarah Hart in 2009. That’s when I realized that the story of Loquareeous was really the story of Devonte Hart, the young Black boy who went viral in 2014 when a photo of him hugging a cop, tears streaming down his face, went viral; CNN dubbed it “the hug shared around the world.” (Sarah and Jennifer Hart were said to have been big on social justice, showing up at rallies and events in a similar fashion.) At the time, some were skeptical of the image; it was taken during a protest in Ferguson over the decision in the Michael Brown case. After a white teacher watches Loquareeous get disciplined (the titular three slaps) in the hallway, social services are sent to his home, and he’s subsequently placed in a new home led by two white women, Amber (Laura Dreyfuss) and Gayle (Jamie Neumann), who already are foster mothers to three Black children, a foul odor, and a lack of good food. I mean, I like this episode about the troubled kid but we waited 50 years for this?”) It’s a brilliant diversion that sets you up for what Glover and company have in store during these Europe-set episodes, not narratively, but stylistically. Season 3’s big hook is that the gang will spend most of their time abroad, but the premiere episode kicks things off in the States, with a story inspired by a familiar meme, an image tied to a story that many may not even realize ended so tragically.

Donald Glover and Brian Tyree Henry in "Sinterklass Is Coming to Town." Coco Olakunle/FX. After a four-year wait that felt even longer, Atlanta is finally ...

The most Atlanta sequence of either episode, though, comes with Van and Darius stumbling their way into the strange and ultimately brutal farewell party for the man Darius assumes is Tupac. None of the other guests seem troubled by these interlopers (though several of them believe Darius is their photographer, despite him only having a phone to take pictures with), and the death doula offers Van a sympathetic ear and the unexpected — but not wholly unwelcome — notion of her and Darius as a couple. For all the fires he has to put out throughout “Sinterklaas” — some of his own making, for forgetting to charge his phone on the last night in Copenhagen — he seems on top of it all. In the real story, the couple managed to kill three of the kids and themselves, where “Three Slaps” blessedly declines to go that far. The Tupac scene aside, “Sinterklaas” is mainly a reminder that, for all the praise we heap onto Atlanta for its tone, its versatility, its profundity, etc, when it wants to be, this is a spectacularly funny television show. It’s a reassurance after the departure of “Three Slaps” that the series hasn’t wholly transformed over its extended absence. Gayle has a temper that scares the kids, while Amber talks to them in chillingly patronizing tones, attempting to rename Loquareeous as “Larry” and encouraging him to sing old-timey work songs while doing forced manual labor in their backyard(*). Loquareeous’ attempt to escape into the arms of a white police officer fails, because of course the cop would listen to these two sweet white ladies over him. But whether Earn is literally waking up from two nightmares, one of which cast him as a white fisherman talking his buddy into his doom, the glimpses are very much linked, even as they are night and day from one another: two workaday guys in a modest boat in the dark, and a hip-hop manager in a blindingly bright hotel room next to the woman he recently had sex with. They in turn hand him over to Amber (Laura Dreyfuss from The Politician) and Gayle (Jamie Newmann from The Deuce), a lesbian couple presenting themselves as woke white saviors who are in fact abusing and exploiting their Black foster children. And Loquareeous’ grandfather issues the episode’s titular three slaps across the face — relatively gentle ones, as such things go, but enough to get Grier to send social workers to their home, convinced Loquareeous is in a dangerous environment from which he needs rescuing. For all its lighthearted goofiness, “Sinterklaas” still has room to depict the killing of a Black man in a way that’s even more upsetting than the monsters attacking the fisherman at the start of “Three Slaps.” And this second episode’s punchline is ultimately about how hard racism is to escape, even in a relatively enlightened place like Amsterdam. The episodes are connected by more than Earn waking up at the end of the first and the start of the second. Yes, Atlanta viewers claim to love how unpredictable the show is, but presenting “Three Slaps” as their lone gift after such a wait would have been a fascinating test of that theory.

'Atlanta' is finally back on FX, and it's reminding us why it's one of the best shows anywhere on TV — read our Season 3 premiere recap.

“It’s destiny,” Darius declares, and they go to the address, where a white woman tells them, “You’re right on time.” She and a bunch more white people dressed in white pile into the van with Darius and Van, taking them to a ceremony of sorts where people are mourning a man on his death bed. Van arrives in Amsterdam and meets up with Darius, telling him she didn’t get a job she wanted and came here to “figure it out.” They go shopping, and when Van finds a coat she likes, she also finds a slip of paper in the pocket with an address on it. (“Feels like Santa’s slave, but I appreciate the rebrand,” Earn says.) Al’s hotel room is trashed, and we see what led to his jail stint: He brought two girls back to his room, and they started arguing with each other in Dutch, getting into a vicious catfight that led to a chair flying through the window. The kids know they’re in serious trouble, and the moms set Corn Pop loose on the side of the road, with one telling the other, “We’re doing what needs to be done.” They speed off in the van — approaching the same haunted lake from the prologue — and look back to make sure “Larry” is there. When a Black child services rep comes to their door, she seems concerned at the state the kids are living in, but one of the moms pulls her aside for a private chat and later announces “everything’s fine.” Suddenly, the moms are packing everyone up in the family van for a surprise road trip — and Loquareeous spots the case worker’s clipboard in a trash pile outside. Thursday’s Season 3 premiere is actually a two-parter, and the first half is one of Atlanta‘s trademark detours, leaving Earn and company entirely to tell the unsettling story of a young Black boy named Loquareeous. After a prologue with two men fishing on a lake that’s haunted by the souls of a Black community drowned by a government-built dam, we meet Loquareeous, who acts out in school and gets sent to the principal.