After a terrific second season and a long corona-induced wait, we’ve got big expectations for the next episodes of Atlanta. And creator/star Donald Glover is only building it up even more, claiming that the next two seasons “are going to be some of the best television ever made”. He continued, “sopranos only ones who can touch us” in a recent Tweet. Damn.
Whether or not it lives up to Sopranos-level acclaim, Atlanta season 3 is currently streaming week-by-week onto SBS On Demand for Australian fans. After a double-episode premiere, new episodes of surreal hip-hop dramedy will be unleashed every Friday until the tenth and final episode drops on May 20.
Last season ended with slacker Earn (Glover) making a very dodgy moral decision in an airport to maintain influence over cousin Alfred/Paper Boi (Brian Tyree Henry). But if you’ve seen the gonzo Teddy Perkins episode or Zazie Beetz’s weird excursions back to her German roots, you’ll know that plot isn’t a huge concern within this show: we’re here for the wild detours, biting little asides into Black artistry in 2022, and those sweet, sweet non sequiturs from Darius (Lakeith Stanfield).
The teaser below gives away absolutely nothing, merely zooming in on Henry’s rags-to-riches rapper after some abstract visuals of an empty city. We hear an unfamiliar voice chanting over and over again, “it’s after the end of the world—don’t you know that yet?”
It’s wild how the careers of everybody involved in Atlanta have taken off. Donald Glover was already a star as rapper Childish Gambino; Zazie Beetz is in a bunch of superhero and Western movies; Brian Tyree Henry was a gay Eternal that caused Hiroshima; and Lakeith Stanfield is a style icon, as well as killing it in one of the 2010’s best satires.
Producer and director Hiro Murai has also established himself as a leading force in badass, surreal visuals: he directed one of my absolute favourite shorts, FKA twigs’ brilliant music video for sad day. They could’ve released that shit as its own standalone episode of Atlanta and just thrown Paper Boi in as an extra, nobody would’ve complained.
