Atlanta Played By Its Own Rules

Stephen Glover on testing the boundaries of television as his (and his brother’s) show signs off.

- By Sam Sanders

STEPHEN GLOVER shows up >> late to the interview in Gucci slacks and fur-fringed Gucci slides. "I gotta waste this money somehow," he'll half-jokingly tell me later. Straightaway, he mentions his vintage-car project and how expensive it's been: "They're a lot of work." It feels almost like self-parody for someone like Glover, who calls himself "the funniest writer in the world, or at least America, but probably in the world, right now"-an introduction reminiscent of every trope of a (fairly) newly moneyed Black man in Hollywood. Except Glover, like the show, he wrote for and executive-produced for six years has a soft center and is much more interested in mulling over big ideas than bragging for bragging's sake.

Prior to his senior year, the younger brother of Donald Glover left Georgia Tech, where he was studying chemical engineering, to help flesh out the TV idea that became Atlanta. The FX show about a local rapper named Paper Boi (Brian Tyree Henry) trying to make it, with help from his cousin-manager Earn (Donald) and stoner sidekick Darius (LaKeith Stanfield), would go on to win numerous awards, including six Emmys. As the series comes to a close, it's become a sort of cult classic, albeit a divisive one.

Season three turned a lot of viewers off with detours and stand-alone plots that took away from the core four characters (including Earn's ex Van, played by Zazie Beetz). And its better fourth and final season continued to lean into the surreal, functioning as horror more than comedy or drama in some episodes. It's a show that can be rewarding if you make peace with its being a bit disjointed. The biggest idea Stephen Glover is now unpacking at its end is one he considers very simple: Yes, Atlanta meant to provoke you.

What genre would you use to classify Atlanta now that it’s complete?