The Atlanta mindset is still like nothing on television

polygon.com:

Atlanta’s third season, arriving four years after its last, is set almost entirely in Europe. This is the first of the show’s many ironies, a sly joke of geography that reminds audiences, in case they’d forgotten: Atlanta is bigger than a place. It’s a mindset.

Donald Glover’s FX series, which returns this week with two new episodes, is ostensibly about Earn Marks (Glover), who convinces his cousin, the rapper Alfred “Paper Boi” Marks (Brian Tyree Henry), to let him be his manager. The dark comedy-drama follows the pair and their friends Van (Zazie Beetz) and Darius (LaKieth Stanfield) as their fortunes rise in the music industry, but also frequently diverts to focus on their personal lives, or somewhere stranger. Like the season 2 standout “Teddy Perkins,” which features Darius picking up a free piano from the eponymous Perkins, a reclusive Michael Jackson stand-in that the cast maintained was a real person although it’s been confirmed Perkins was played by Glover himself in prosthetics and makeup.

Throughout the show’s first two seasons, Atlanta expanded its scope to be just about anything — a B.E.T. spoof complete with fake commercials, a short story about middle schoolers, or an episode that showed its cast having to contend with a Black Justin Bieber. The third season premiere, “Three Slaps,” immediately re-asserts Atlanta’s freeform structure: it doesn’t feature the regular cast at all. Instead, it tells a story about a young boy named Loquareeous, who is shunted into the foster care system and ends up in the care of a white lesbian couple that don’t seem to care about him that much.

Then, in the next episode, it’s business as usual, picking up with Earn and Co. in Copenhagen as Paper Boi begins his first big