The final season of Atlanta is on its way, and Donald Glover and Co. will be returning to the titular city. A new trailer confirms the fourth and final season will premiere in September and that the story will bring them back to Atlanta after last season’s Europe-based adventures.
In the characteristically surreal trailer, Earn and Van walk out of a convenience store to a world of direct references to the first two seasons’ most hilarious and harrowing moments. Darius drives the invisible car from season one, a falling piano and the hatching ostrich egg recall the terrifying Teddy Perkins episode, the alligator that lives with Katt Williams’ character crawls on the wall in the background, and pizza delivery guy-slash-social media prankster Zan takes a selfie. Alfred closes out the trailer by giving a literal mic-drop.
The promise of an actual Atlanta-based season — and, hopefully, resolutions to unanswered questions — will be reassuring to some after a divisive third season, which deviated widely from the show’s focus on the primary quartet of characters.
The recent season, which finished in May and came after a long four-year hiatus, partly chronicled the European hijinx of the four main characters: Alfred is on tour while battling creative blocks for his music, Earn has found his stride as a manager, Darius maintains his signature curiosity while traveling alongside them, and Van ends the season with her own journey of self-discovery. But nearly half of the season was made of standalone episodes that were completely unrelated to the characters we came to know and love. Even by Atlanta’s subversive and unpredictable storytelling standards, the season was the weirdest and perhaps most uneven one yet.
“I’ve always thought that season 3 was our magnum opus,” Stephen Glover, Donald’s brother and a writer and executive producer of the show, told GQ after the finale. “This is where we did it all. But it's funny, Hiro [Murai, the show’s primary director and an executive producer] and Donald have always said season 4 is going to be even better. They're really high on season 4. And I think season 4 is good. Our mantra for that season was just, have more fun.”
He added, speaking on the final season: “Season 4 is definitely going to have the surrealism. I think our show has always had that every season. It'll feel different from season 3, for sure. With each season we try and make it feel a little different in any way that we can. Coming back to Atlanta, I think there's going to be a special feeling for season [3]. That'll make it feel special from the first two.”
