"Donald describes his artistic process to me as he makes us toast. At first, it appears the bread is just sitting there on the plate, when a perfectly good toaster is plugged in just nearby on the kitchen counter.
"'Wait for it,' Donald says to me in my native tongue of German. (Later, his brother would inform me Donald spent one evening in a Taiwanese sauna learning the language of every culture that ever oppressed another one, just so he knew how to pitch our show to FX.)
Slowly, the bread began crisping into a golden brown, just under the heady unblinking gaze of Donald's eyes. 'Which of my upcoming projects do you want on your toast?' he asked dispassionately as his irises gleamed red."
I laughed quite a bit at this tweet, which incisively took the piss out of a recent New Yorker profile of Donald Glover, a profile that coincided with the release of the second season of Atlanta, the TV series starring and co-created by Glover (and which airs Friday nights on SBS VICELAND).
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The tweet, painstakingly reproduced in the magazine's font to look bona fide, seemed to nail both the sense of awe with which Glover is regarded - perhaps justifiably - by large swathes of the media, both establishment and social, and the cult of personality Glover is creating around himself.
The charismatic, hard-working and multi-talented writer and performer has always appeared pretty self-possessed, but that seems to have ramped up a notch or two with the release of Atlanta's new episodes, not to mention the acclaim with which Awaken, My Love!, Glover's last musical project under the alias Childish Gambino, was received and the rise in profile that has accompanied his being cast as Lando Calrissian in the forthcoming Solo (all due respect to Alden Ehrenreich, who plays the title role, but Glover's handful of moments, all without dialogue, dominate the Solo trailer) and Simba in the upcoming Lion King remake.
As is usually the case in such situations, when someone is anointed the genius du jour, I find myself torn between "Hey, right on, this person deserves it" and "Hey, ease back, it's not like this person can brown toast through sheer willpower and eye beams".
But I don't know, man...watching these new Atlanta episodes? Shit, maybe Glover can whip up a tasty batch of toast with his eye-beams. The show's that good.
I will admit to finding myself less invested in the storylines involving Paper Boi (Brian Tyree Henry), the rapper whose rise to success is managed by his seemingly aimless cousin Earn (played by Glover), although this season's third episode did kick off with a hilarious scalding burn against internet outrage when Instagrammer 'lilysmom_11' (love that dead-on handle) posted a video decrying Paper Boi's latest track - she was very upset by the song's racism and sexism but extremely upset by the Colin Kaepernick name-check - and the "white tears" factor sent the track's popularity soaring.
(Also, any scene featuring Paper Boi usually features his spacy offsider Darius, played by the remarkable Lakeith Stanfield, and any scene with Darius is bound to be an unpredictable, off-kilter delight.)
But when Atlanta focuses on Earn, and more specifically on the frustrating relationship between Earn and Van (Zazie Beetz), the mother of Earn's young daughter, the show really finds a groove that's not necessarily unique - because there's a fair few shows depicting the complexities of modern love and commitment - but definitely distinctive.
There's an inert quality to the relationship between these two that feels authentic in many ways. There's long been a sense that Van wants more from Earn - hell, she'll take his definition of what their relationship actually is - and that's balanced by the feeling that Earn wants to keep everything in suspended animation until he sorts himself out psychologically, emotionally and financially (there's certainly no other show I'm currently checking out that conveys economic precariousness more acutely than this one).
But Van doesn't want to live like that, and she shouldn't. We've seen enough of her interaction with Earn - and more importantly, enough of Van's life separate from Earn (it seems dumb to say the show's been generous in this regard, but it certainly has paid more attention to Van than one might have anticipated) - to gather that she is no adjunct to the show's central character. ("I want to be in a committed relationship where I'm valued as a human being and not as an accessory you can fuck," she told Earn in the show's most recent episode, to which he correctly replied "That's a good answer".)
Hell, it wouldn't be out of character for Atlanta to shift its focus to Van entirely for the remainder of the season. Beetz, soon to be seen in Deadpool 2, has the presence to carry it, for sure.
