Atlanta Review

Glover's series is barely a series in the ordinary sense. Earn managing his cousin's rap career is a frame the show walks away from whenever something better appears, and the best episodes have no bearing on any plot at all. Teddy Perkins is a self-contained horror film about what a father's ambition costs, staged in one house and aired without breaks. B.A.N. is a fake television broadcast, fake commercials included. The third season goes further and spends whole hours with characters we never see again.

That drift is deliberate and it does cost the show momentum, which is the honest reason it sits a step below the top tier, but it buys a dream logic no other American series sustains. Christian Sprenger's photography is the strongest argument for it, warm and shallow and faintly unreal, closer to film than anything else on cable. Brian Tyree Henry gives Paper Boi a weariness that carries the show's actual thesis about visibility as a burden, and Zazie Beetz and LaKeith Stanfield work in registers that should not fit together and somehow do. Uneven on purpose, and unmatched at its peak.