Donald Glover's "Atlanta" came to an end Thursday on FX, completing a four-season voyage of discovery into just what can be accomplished with a title, an adventurous crew and 41 episodes of television. Appropriately, it ends with an episode (unseen as of this writing) written by Glover and directed by Hiro Murai, who together made the first episode as well, and set the tone for one of television's greatest, which is not to say most watched, series.
On the possibly very good chance "Atlanta" is new to you (you can watch it all on Hulu, then watch it again), it's built around a quartet of characters. Glover, who created the show and grew up just outside to Atlanta, plays Earn, who comes back to town, having sometime earlier dropped out of Princeton. (Details are hazy until this season.) He noncommittally reconnects with former girlfriend Vanessa aka Van (Zazie Beetz), the mother of his baby daughter, Lottie (no longer a baby, and played this year by Austin Elle Fisher). He looks up his cousin Alfred (Brian Tyree Henry), who raps under the name Paper Boi, and wangles a job as his manager. Darius (LaKeith Stanfield), who has a mystical bent and knows a lot about real things and about a lot of things that aren't real, is Al's sidekick and partner in low-level drug dealing, until pop success makes that business unnecessary. They are elemental — earth (Al), water (Earn), fire (Van) and air (Darius) — and yet highly particularized. Surrounding them are family, friends, associates, nemeses, competitors, officials, clerks and strange strangers, who range from amusingly quirky to actively threatening.
The show is highly episodic, but there are longer narrative arcs of an unhurried sort now coming to a conclusion; little about "Atlanta" is hurried, in fact, which is not to say that, here and there, characters aren't required to move fast. (So unconcerned is Glover with building up serial steam that the later seasons are "interrupted" by self-contained episodes — short stories, really — that, while they speak to the series' themes, involve none of the regular characters.) It's a Southern show, in setting and pace, languorous, lazy. In the first episode, when Al and Darius leave for an appointment, it is only to sit on an old couch on the lawn outside their apartment and get high.
