Friday 8 September 2023

Atlanta - Season 4 (2022 Donald & Stephen Glover)

Mad stuff with Darius returning his air fryer and being pursued by a woman in a wheelchair. And with Earn and Van lost in an escapeless car park (has someone been reading Sartre?)  And Earn's therapy sessions really aren't working!

Atlanta is like a crazy and disparate collection of objects precariously balanced on the edge of a cliff.

Hiro Murai directed many of them.

In creepy episode written by Janine Nabers, Van takes her daughter to an audition at Chocolate Land Studios and she is kidnapped into the system. (Donald plays 'Mr. Chocolate'.) Great insider's joke here -

"We can fix it in post."
"Post has asked us if we can fix it in pre."

In Francesca Sloane and Karen Joseph Adcock's episode 'The Goof Who Sat By the Door', we take a documentary look at Thomas Washington, the black animator who was briefly CEO of Disney. This must have been done with Disney's cooperation and is perhaps something of a 'fuck you' to Ron De Santis, who's been targeting the studio as being too liberal. It's played commendably with a totally straight face.

Ends with Paper Boi on his farm, nearly dying. Brian Tyree Henry's performance amazing. Tense and creepy, involving a wild hog and a tractor. Writer: Taofik Kolade. Then the finale is a mix of Darius's experience in a sensory deprivation tank and the other three dining at an (empty) black sushi restaurant where they really want the junk food chicken opposite. The sequence involving Darius and a drink-driving woman who then steals a policeman's gun is one that made me laugh and laugh more than I had done in ages. Written by Donald.



From FX, owned by Disney since 2019.

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