We had a cruelly long wait between the second and third seasons of Atlanta, one of TV’s most versatile and thought-provoking shows. A big thanks to star and creator Donald Glover for moving things along way quicker for the next season of surreal dark comedy about Black life and art!
Atlanta‘s fourth and final season will premiere on SBS On Demand this September 16, and it’s bringing the whole squad back home where they started. It looks like their psychedelic voyages in Europe have left them in a strange state, and all season three‘s terrific standalone episodes about the weirdness of whiteness can’t be a good sign for what’s next.
Paper Boi (Brian Tyree Henry) might be doing better after his scuffles with the lame-ass fashion industry and confronting his mother’s death. Fan fave Darius (Lakeith Stanfield) had to deal with plenty of appropriation, and will no doubt continue doin’ his own beguiling thing. And poor Van (Zazie Beetz) had a complete identity crisis, briefly pretending to be Amelie before realising she craves the security of her Georgia home.
We’re most concerned about Earn (Glover), who seems to have completely assimilated into the crushing bureaucracy of his managerial role, ominously wearing the creepy White Earn’s T-shirt in the last season’s coda. Has he levelled up, or just sold out?
Glover made some big promises about the last two seasons of Atlanta, tweeting in late 2020 that “while im here: atlanta s3+s4 are going to be some of the best television ever made. sopranos only ones who can touch us”. Whew that’s quite a claim to make, and yet what we’ve seen so far has indeed been pretty mind-boggling. Do not let anyone spoil the celebrity cameo in the “Cancel Club” episode for you, because that truly rocked our socks.
A show that has made unpredictability its bread and butter, it would be foolish to try and guess what’s up too much in season four. But we hope that the main quartet of characters can find a bit of themselves by being back in their home city, despite all its unique, trippy issues chronicled in the first two seasons.
