Marshall Johnson, an unassuming white man who loves NPR, has his life upended when it’s discovered his ancestors enslaved people. An episode later, Paper Boi enacts revenge on a white billionaire by destroying the possession he most cherishes with no consequences.Įpisode 4, “The Big Payback,” is the most overt example of short-term sacrifices leading to long-term liberation. The climax of “Sinterklaas is Coming to Town” sees Earn escaping unscathed from a racist tour promoter who beats up a semi-innocent man in blackface-*cough, cough* how innocent can anyone be wearing blackface?-who he assumes is Paper Boi’s manager. The fictional Loquareeous, a stand-in for Devonte Hart, escapes a car crash and his Black siblings survive while their tormentors face a grizzly fate. In “Three Slaps,” the real-life killing of Black children at the hands of a lesbian white couple is subverted. As Marina Warner wrote in her 2014 book Once Upon a Time: A Short History of Fairy Tale, “Fairy tales evoke every kind of violence, injustice, and mischance, but in order to declare it need not continue.” For racism not to continue in the world of Atlanta something or someone has to give.Įach episode of Season 3 sees a white figure punished for an act of racism that they’d typically avoid the consequences of in the real world or a Black person becoming the beneficiary of karmic justice usually unattainable in our universe.
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Instead of fairy-tale lessons of yore like teaching poor children the virtues of being grateful or teaching young women how to stomach arranged marriages to aesthetically challenged beasts, Atlanta in 2022 ponders how white suffering (often in the short term) may lead to Black liberation in the long term. This “curse” is the big bad wolf of the season, the malevolent force haunting every story line. But you don’t know you’re enslaved just like him.” It’s easy to see the Black man as cursed, because you’ve separated yourself from him. “But the thing about being white is it blinds you. With enough blood and money anyone can be white,” E explains. Like a Jiminy Cricket figure, E delivers the moral conundrum and thematic backbone of the season as he tells the story of “a self-governed Black town” that drowned in the body of water years ago (similar to folk tales of Lake Lanier).
In the first five minutes of Episode 1, a white liberal dressed in redneck clothing named Earnest (a.k.a E) fishes at night with a Black friend. Umar, as unsubtle as it is racially charged. The moral of Atlanta’s latest season arrives like a sledgehammer from Dr. Similarly, for Atlanta’s “Black fairy tale” to have a happy ending, whiteness would have to live through brutal nightmares.
For kids to learn a morality lesson, someone needs to suffer whether it’s just or not. Similarly, it isn’t enough that Goldilocks is a thief she also has to stomp on Baby Bear’s chair like Rick James. Sure Hansel and Gretel are starving, but common sense dictates you shouldn’t eat an old lady’s home even if it’s made out of dessert. The true asshole of a fairy tale is often in the eye of the beholder. So when Glover revealed that his desire for Atlanta’s penultimate season was to make a “Black fairy tale,” the grand design felt as quaint as it was potentially fraught. Less than two years after the show premiered, Glover compared his vision of the plot-light follow-up to the 1992 direct-to-video classic, Tiny Toon Adventures: How I Spent My Vacation.
had to “Trojan horse” the surrealist ambitions of the show’s first season to a less-than-enthusiastic FX. Depending upon your appetite, the mystery meats that go into the show’s creation are just as interesting as what appears on screen. Every season of Atlanta arrives like a prepackaged sausage. Donald Glover is television’s consummate mythmaker.
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