This kind of violence always strikes me as particularly heinous-much like in Frank Norris’s naturalist novel McTeague, which showcased an original “obscene” affair, when the title character murders his wife in an aside, an attack perhaps made more vicious because we can’t see it happening. In the first three episodes, Earn, Alfred, and Darius are strong-armed out of their valuables: money, drugs, dignity. This narrative languor and slow pacing (this is funny, especially because it’s about black people who live in the South, “lazy” being a dumb racial epithet for black Americans’ work ethic) makes the sudden violence they face, a trope established in season one and frequented in these early episodes, all the more garish. The fact that these characters have only made lateral moves since we last saw them contributes to the show’s meandering quality. In the first three episodes Van (Zazie Beetz) is rarely around, but when she does pop up she doesn’t seem markedly different, and anyway, she’s still on-and-off-again with Earn, so her heart’s in the same place. Darius (Lakeith Stanfield) is still Darius, spouting conspiracy theories with the same vigor Alfred’s fans spit Paper Boi bars. Alfred (Brian Tyree Henry) aka Paper Boi, who is on house arrest in the season premiere, has taken a step back in some ways, but has a hot new single on the radio. Earn (Donald Glover) is still managing his cousin Alfred’s rap career, and is still homeless. Nothing much has changed for the characters. The scene lays out the theme of the show’s sophomore season, nicknamed Atlanta Robbin ’ Season, we learn, because it’s set during the holidays, when the thieves and scammers are out in full force. The scene lays out the theme of the show’s sophomore season, nicknamed Atlanta Robbin ’ Season because it’s set during the holidays, when the thieves and scammers are out in full force. A woman who we hadn’t known was in the backseat stumbles out, crying and bloody, yet unsure where her wounds are. The two chase each other through the establishment, and right as the bandits are pulling out of the parking lot, the shift manager steadily delivering bullets through the vehicle’s rear window, the car slumps still. The restaurant employee has a machine gun of his own and retaliates. One dude hops into the restaurant, fires some more, and goes into the supply room for his quarry, an enviable quantity of marijuana. They pull out semi-automatic guns and then shoot into the restaurant through the slot you’d usually get fries from. And they move with a complementary ugliness, brandishing weapons, metamorphosing from guileless potheads to potential murderers. The guys, only a second ago dreaming of takeout, are all of a sudden grotesques, masks disfiguring their faces. As the car ambles towards the pay-window, you think: how fun, how radical this banality is, which Atlanta’s first season elaborated through the sprawl of its set pieces the slow-as-molasses establishing shots by its frequent director, Hiro Murai and its Zora Neale Hurston-cum-Flannery O’Connor lyrical humor and lived-in cruelty. They end up at the knockoff Popeyes drive-thru cul-de-sac, order a big meal along with a “number 17,” code for a side of weed. Damn near everybody is, and all the principal characters are.) One is playing video games, the other is talking about scoring some pot from a dealer who works at a fast-food place. (The identifier “black” should basically go unsaid when talking about this show. A key observation in Tad Friend’s New Yorker profile of Donald Glover, which doubles as a clue about Atlanta, the auteur’s FX Golden Globe-winning show: “He feels constantly watched but rarely seen.” The early minutes of last week’s season premiere are devoted to the minutiae of two black guys in their late teens or early twenties, rarely seen or “seen” on TV, at least not in this way.
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