The Survival Instincts of Atlantas Flawless Second Season

This post contains spoilers for Atlanta Season 2, Episode 11, “Crabs in a Barrel.”[hhmc]

Perhaps its merely serendipity that multi-talented multi-hyphenate Donald Glovers many projects are all reaching fruition right about now. The second-season finale of FXs Atlanta, which aired Thursday, coincided with the premiere of Solo: A Star Wars Story (in which he plays a young Lando Calrissian), a new music video (“This Is America”, as Childish Gambino) and, to tie it all together, an all-time great turn hosting Saturday Night Live, a show Glover unsuccessfully auditioned for at the start of his career. But its also like Glover to be this clever—and in his work of the moment, its possible to see the [long roots][https://slate.com/culture/2018/05/this-is-america-atlanta-robbin-season-and-the-dark-and-twisty-world-of-childish-gambino-video.html] of tensions hes rapped about, written about, joked about, and been performing for over a decade.

The first season of Atlanta, which unfolds the lives of struggling black creatives with lyrical grace, was shot through with invisible but cloying threads of chaos—a metaphysical undertow that seemed constantly on the verge of swamping its characters. The second go-round was subtitled “Robbin Season,” a reference to the explosion of petty crime that precedes Christmas. But while the chaos has been a little more criminal this season—Al (Brian Tyree Henry) was held up at gunpoint, Darius (Lakeith Stanfield) wandered into a murder-suicide, Uncle Willy (Katt Williams) ran screaming from the cops, and Earn (Glover) tried his hand at mall-based gift-card scamming—this fraying of things was ultimately less a reflection of the holiday-shopping season than a deepening of the core themes Atlanta has been elucidating all along: the gaslit, surreal experience of oppression in America, in which the untrammeled will to survive is so often contingent on dragging down others just like you.

The finale, “Crabs in a Barrel,” bookended a season that began with another animal-invoking title: “Alligator Man”. There are no literal crabs in the finale (which is too bad, because the literal alligator in “Alligator Man” was showstopping), but the title still resonates. In an episode filled with disappointment and frustration, Earn manages to juggle every ball hes handed until a long moment at airport security when he realizes Willys rose-gold gun—a beautiful, ridiculous, deadly embodiment of a certain limited sort of dignity—is still in his backpack, which is about to go through the X-ray machine. Earn pauses, and the sound drops out behind him, leaving him in a perfect bubble of complete panic. His instincts take over, and he slips the gun into the backpack of Clark County (RJ Walker), a rival rapper to Als Paper Boi, except more industry-friendly—and more successful. Hes headlining the tour, a gig that Earn and Al would love to land. So why not kill a few birds with one planted gun?

The episode hinges on this moment of instinct. When nothings left but reflexes, Earns impulse is to drag down the guy next to him so that he might have a leg up. Thats the titular barrel of crabs: And its this vicious survival of the fittest that “Robbin Season” is really focused on. In the most desperate quadrants of America, its always robbin season.

“Alligator Man,” in its own way, emphasized the primal, too: there, Willy throws his nephew and his girlfriend to the police, unleashes his alligator onto the world, and then flees like pursued prey into the sunset. Again and again this season, Atlantas characters undercut those closest to them: the girls one upping each other while seeking fame at Drakes party in “Champagne Papi,” or Young Earn and Al trying to manage school bullies in the flashback episode “FUBU,” or the unhinged man who imprisoned his own brother from the world in “Teddy Perkins.” It seems fitting that like a scavenger or a snake, Teddy cracks into an almost raw ostrich egg for breakfast, spooning goopy innards onto his toast. Survival is a visceral, constant, ugly struggle.

These invocations of the animal world are particularly charged. Reducing human beings to animals is a timeworn method for oppression, and for African-Americans in particular, animal rhetoric has been a long-standing tool of white supremacy. Atlanta engages with this cruel framing to try to express something about poverty and desperation, and how they infiltrate the spirit. After all, the recurrent thread in Atlanta Season 2 is also in “This Is America." In Childish Gambinos video, Glover dances like hes twisting himself into knots, celebrating the black people around him and then whipping out a weapon to gun them down. Theres an intense ambivalence on display, between the success of the individual and the state of the people—a tension that Ta-Nehisi Coates described in his recent interrogation of Kanye Wests newfound Trumpism.

Glover appears to be ruminating on it in his work of late, boiling it down to its component ugliness, especially in the final few episodes of Atlanta this season. “FUBU” is perhaps the most pointed and, as a result, it stretches the imagination most: Young Earn (Alkoya Brunson), teased mercilessly about his shirt, is saved from further humiliation by his cool cousin Al (Abraham Clinkscales), who switches the bullies attention from Earn to another classmate. The bullying torments the second boy so much that he goes home and kills himself. Its got the heightened quality of an after-school special, which isnt great—and undercuts the otherwise understated and beautifully rendered tragedy of marginal childhood, with its acute peaks and valleys. But the takeaway could not be more plain: it was either Earn or the other boy. Someone had to get thrown to the dogs.

In contrast to Earn, Als always been someone who understands how things work. In the standout episode “Woods,” Al unexpectedly has to escape an armed robbery and survive in Georgia pines for hours, and he does—because of course he does. His only weakness, if it is a weakness, is cannabis—not really that he smokes it, but that he cant stand to exist without it. In a recent New Yorker profile, Glover pointed out that Atlantas portrayal of drug use has a harsh subtext: “People come to Atlanta for the strip clubs and the music and the cool talking, but the eat-your-vegetables part is that the characters arent smoking weed all the time because its cool but because they have P.T.S.D.—every black person does,” he said. The finale offers a different twist on this. Earn refuses the drug—then spends the day fearing and fretting whats to come, agonizing over what he must do, entangling himself into knots. Al smokes, and he glides; seemingly, he always glides. But as Henrys excellent performance throughout this season has demonstrated, Al still feels it all.

Perhaps that is why at the end of “Crabs in a Barrel,” when Earn is contemplating his near-miss in his window seat, the look on his face is somewhere between acceptance, guilt, and minor victory. Throughout “Robbin Season,” Earns constant squabbling with Als friend from prison, Tracy (Khris Davis), has taken on on the familiar him-or-me survival dynamic. When it escalated to an actual skirmish earlier in the season, Earn lost. But in the finales final scene, Tracy stands outside the house theyve just vacated, hollering to get in—not understanding that Earn has firmly taken Tracy out of the equation, too. Finally, Earn has learned how to play the game.

Get Vanity Fairs HWD NewsletterSign up for essential industry and award news from Hollywood.Full ScreenPhotos:Donald Glover Just Joined a Proud Golden Globes Tradition

Donald Glover — Atlanta (2017)

Photo: By the conventional wisdom, it should have been newcomer and HBO auteur Issa Rae joining the ranks of bright young female stars who have gotten their start at the Golden Globes. And wed be tempted to slot The Crown star and freshly-minted winner Claire Foy in here, but her last big project, Wolf Hall, was a Globes winner in 2016 so shes hardly a stranger to the HFPA. So its up to Atlanta creator and star, Donald Glover, to carry the 2017 banner for the fresh faces at the Golden Globes. Sure, Glover did his time on the excellent (though HFPA-overlooked) Community, but with a series win for Atlanta on top of Glovers Best Actor win, this is really his coming out as a creative TV force in his own right.

Rachel Bloom — Crazy Ex-Girlfriend (2016)

“What we do have is great faith in the show, great faith in the showrunners and the creators, Aline Brosh McKenna and Rachel Bloom. We believe in the show. We stand by the show,” CW chief Mark Pedowitz said just hours before Bloom walked away with the award for Best Leading Actress in a comedy. Pedowitz got an enthusiastic shout out from Bloom as she grasped her award and took home the CWs second consecutive actress win in a row. “We believe there is a place on our schedule today for a show like this and were going to give it a chance to get seen. You cant beat quality like this,” Pedowitz said. With a Golden Globe in her pocket, odds are Bloom just got an even better chance at a second season.

Claire Danes — My So-Called Life (1995)

Danes was just 15 years old when she won for the cult-favorite drama My So-Called Life, beating out vets like Kathy Baker (Picket Fences), Angela Lansbury (Murder, She Wrote), Heather Locklear (Melrose Place), and Jane Seymour (Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman). Despite low ratings, My So-Called Life was a huge critical success, and Danes, in particular, was singled out for her emotional portrayal of Angela Chase. But Daness rising star combined with low ratings eventually spelled doom for My So-Called Life. Danes would return to the Globes several times, though, winning once for the TV movie Temple Grandin and twice for her work on Homeland.

Angelina Jolie — George Wallace (1998)

A 22-year-old Jolie collected her first piece of awards-season hardware for playing Cornelia Wallace opposite Gary Sinise in the pretty much forgotten TNT TV movie George Wallace. Newcomer Jolie beat out Joely Fisher (Ellen), Della Reese (Touched by an Angel), Gloria Reuben (ER), and her George Wallace co-star Mare Winningham. Jolies acting family legacy may have had something to do with her success—look no further than the ceremonys Mr/Miss Golden Globe tradition to see the H.F.P.A.s fascination with Hollywood royalty—but it was a canny, forward-looking choice nonetheless. The Globes would honor Jolie again in 1999 for the TV movie Gia and help seal the deal for her Oscar win in 2000 by awarding her for Girl, Interrupted. Jolie has been nominated three more times since, for A Mighty Heart, Changeling, and The Tourist.

Lena Dunham — Girls (2013)

Riding a wave of new-kid-on-the-block buzz, Girls creator and star Lena Dunham beat out that long-running TV-comedy trifecta of Tina Fey (30 Rock), Julia Louis-Dreyfus (Veep), and Amy Poehler (Parks and Recreation) and well as fellow TV newcomer Zooey Deschanel (New Girl). Poehler—who was also hosting that year—accepted her defeat gracefully from George Clooneys lap. Not a bad consolation prize. “I thought I was going to be a cooler customer if this ever happened, which I didnt think it would,” a flustered Dunham said from the stage. She went on to thank her fellow nominees for getting her through “middle school” and “mono.” “Congratulations, Lena,” Fey and Poehler later joked from the stage, ”Im glad we got you through middle school!” When Fey won a SAG Award later that month she added, “Ive known [Amy] since [she] was pregnant with Lena Dunham.” Girls also won for best comedy in 2013, and Dunham would be nominated two more times for playing Hannah Horvath.

Calista Flockhart — Ally McBeal (1998)

With little more than The Birdcage as a credit to her name, Calista Flockhart, with her short-skirted power suits and C.G.I. baby, danced her way into the pop-culture zeitgeist with Ally McBeal. Flockhart beat out Kirstie Alley (Veronicas Closet), Ellen DeGeneres (Ellen), Jenna Elfman (Dharma & Greg) Helen Hunt (Mad About You), and Brooke Shields (Suddenly Susan). Something tells me Hunt—who took home both a different Golden Globe and the Oscar that year for As Good as It Gets—was O.K. with losing this one. Flockhart called her win a “staggering surprise” but would go on to be nominated for Ally McBeal four more years in a row.

Gina Rodriguez — Jane the Virgin (2015)

Like Keri Russell before her, Gina Rodriguez is the only one to bring home a Golden Globe (so far!) for her network, the CW. Rodriguez beat out Lena Dunham (Girls), Edie Falco (Nurse Jackie), Julia Louis-Dreyfus (Veep), and Taylor Schilling (Orange Is the New Black), and gave an impassioned, tearful speech saying, “This award is so much more than myself, it represents a culture that wants to see themselves as heroes.” Rodriguez was nominated again in 2016 for her work on Jane the Virgin but lost out to fellow CW star and even newer TV talent, Rachel Bloom of Crazy Ex-Girlfriend.PreviousNext