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Donald Glover sat behind the wheel of the Nissan Sentra, his door ajar, and lit a joint. In the scene he’d just finished, for the show “Atlanta,” he’d jammed on the brakes to avoid a wild boar in the road, an apparition that made him wonder just how high he was. On this crisp October morning, the car was parked beside Gun Club Road in northwest Atlanta, a woodsy region where a few shacks and a cemetery were all that gestured toward urban life. “This isn’t real,” Glover said—his joint was a prop, filled with clover and marshmallow leaves. “But it actually makes me feel kind of high. Smoking in the car like high school.” He passed the joint to his co-star Zazie Beetz, who inhaled companionably as Glover nodded along to the rhythm of the door-alarm beeps.
Glover is the thirty-four-year-old creator, head writer, occasional director, and star of “Atlanta,” the black comedy about black life—three men and a woman going nowhere much, and beginning to realize it—that in its first season won two Golden Globes, two Emmys, and nearly universal admiration. Chris Rock told me, “ ‘Atlanta’ is the best show on TV, period.” In this episode, from the second season (which débuts this Thursday, on FX), Glover and Beetz’s characters, Earnest (Earn) Marks and Vanessa (Van) Keifer, are driving north from Atlanta in Van’s old Sentra to a German festival called Fastnacht. Van, who speaks German for reasons we never learn, is excited; Earn, who inclines toward watchful truculence, is not. Earn and Van have a daughter and they sleep together off and on, but they are not precisely a couple. “At FX, they didn’t get Earn and Van at all,” Glover told me. “I said, ‘This is every one of my aunts—you have a kid with a guy, he’s around, you’re still attracted to him.’ Poor people can’t afford to go to therapy.”
As they waited for the next scene, Beetz turned the conversation to marriage; she and her boyfriend had been talking about engagement rings. Glover said, “Yeah, I’m not the marrying kind.” (He and his partner, Michelle, had a nineteen-month-old son, Legend, and she was eight months pregnant with their second son.) He took a hit, then went on, “I’m O.K. with some rituals. If you grew up knowing there was a bear in your future, because your dad kept telling you, ‘When you’re thirteen, you’re going to have to kill a bear,’ then, when you turned thirteen, you would kill the bear.” Beetz was baffled. “The bear,” she repeated. The door was still beeping, the way a jarring sound grows in a scene until you realize it’s an alarm clock and it was all a dream.
“Atlanta” has the hallucinatory quality of déjà rêvé; no other show would conjure up, then banish, a black rapper named Justin Bieber. The series, shot almost entirely on location, shifts its setting and focus every episode, mapping the city in the fanciful manner of a medieval cartographer. Hiro Murai, who directs most of the episodes, said, “Atlanta is Wild West-y—every corner of the city is trying to get by under its own rules. There’s no single narrative. At the outer edges, the overgrown parking lots and project blocks, the city is a few yards away from apocalypse, and if you slow down it could engulf you.” As the crew had set up for the boar scene, a nearly toothless man driving a beat-up Honda stacked with Twinkies and Valvoline made a U-turn to try to get in front of the cameras. At a barricade cordoning off the shoot, he called out, “Yo, shrimps, here comes Johnny!”
Glover grew up just outside Atlanta, and he makes the city look both vast and confiningly tiny, as it might to an onlooker playing with a telescope. In the pilot episode, Earn, a rootless Princeton dropout who’s been doing odd jobs, goes to his cousin Alfred Miles’s house with a proposition—and is greeted with a gun in his face. Alfred, a rapper known as Paper Boi, who pays his bills by dealing drugs, is beginning to be a local success, and in a crabs-in-a-barrel city everyone wants to pull him back into the barrel. Alfred’s roommate, Darius, a slinky conspiracy theorist, lowers his knife when he sees that Earn poses no threat and offers him a cookie.
Glover’s dialogue exhibits a saltatory quality that also defines his career. As a boy, he wanted to be a wedding planner. Instead, he has been a sketch comic; a standup comedian; a writer on “30 Rock”; an actor on “Community”; a d.j. named mc DJ; a musician known as Childish Gambino, who was nominated for five Grammys this year; and a budding movie star, who will appear as both Lando Calrissian in “Solo: A Star Wars Story,” out in May, and Simba in a live-action version of “The Lion King.” “He can push the envelope in all these different areas,” Ryan Coogler, a friend of Glover’s, who wrote and directed “Black Panther,” said. “And it’s not that difficult for him.”
Slim but thick-chested and broad-shouldered, Glover has the rolling, slew-footed walk of a riverboat captain. In a group, he laughs as often as he makes others laugh, a trait rare among the occupationally funny. Acquaintances love to proclaim how warm or chill or dope he is, but none of that is exactly right, or exactly right for long. He answers the phone warily, as if it were always 3 a.m., as if he were on guard against his own immense likableness. He is attracted to people who don’t seem to want his approval, but, increasingly, everyone does.
In Hollywood, Glover has become the model for how to succeed on your own terms. Lena Dunham, the creator and star of “Girls,” said, “At least twenty people have told me, ‘I’d like to make something like “Atlanta.” ’And I say, ‘Oh, you mean a show that toggles between painful drama and super-surrealist David Lynch moments to take on race in America?’ That’s not a genre—that’s Donald.”
Glover has always been told he doesn’t sound black or Southern, loaded compliments he rejects. He has a house in Atlanta and a studio in Los Angeles, and often rents a place in Kauai, but he rarely settles in any of them. When he’s in L.A., he sleeps on a couch at the studio, in Silver Lake. One night in January, he drove to Target to buy a blanket to make it cozier. He was feeling immense pressure to edit the show and promote it, make his next album, and finish work on “The Lion King,” along with an animated show he’s making for FX, “Deadpool.” Everyone was calling, texting, expecting. The next morning, after sleeping his customary four or five hours, he wrote a reminder in red ballpoint and posted it on the wall: “Make the best sand castle.” The goal wasn’t to please all the supplicants; the goal was to resist getting too comfortable. “If I was white, I wouldn’t be sleeping on no couch,” he told me. “But Ryan Coogler said the most real-as-fuck shit to me about it. He said, ‘It sounds like you’re not ready to get off the couch.’ ”
Jordan Peele, the writer and director of the racial-horror film “Get Out,” said, “For black people, ‘Atlanta’ provides the catharsis of ‘Finally, some elevated black shit.’ ” For white people, Glover wants the catharsis to be an old-fashioned plunge into pity and fear. “I don’t even want them laughing if they’re laughing at the caged animal in the zoo,” he said. “I want them to really experience racism, to really feel what it’s like to be black in America. 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 aren’t smoking weed all the time because it’s cool but because they have P.T.S.D.—every black person does. It’s scary to be at the bottom, yelling up out of the hole, and all they shout down is ‘Keep digging! We’ll reach God soon!’ ”
Glover and Beetz tooled up and down Gun Club Road for hours, getting filmed from one side and then the other as they chatted about why they were going to Fastnacht. Earn and Van are feeling floaty and relaxed, enjoying each other—a setup for quarrels to come.
As the crew reset, Glover said, “You know what I always wanted to do for an episode?” Just then, that week’s director, Amy Seimetz, called, “O.K., action!” The actors ran the scene again. On “Cut!,” Glover continued his thought: “Yeah, so it’s the exact same thing, only with a bunch of white people who kind of look like us. And in the middle of the episode you realize it’s called ‘Boston.’ ”
After a few more takes, Glover said, “I have an idea for a movie about a hipster guy surviving in his house after the end of the world—no canned food, no water. None of us are equipped to survive for even two weeks.”
“Whoa,” Beetz said.
“I watch ‘Cast Away’ so much”—the Robert Zemeckis film in which Tom Hanks is stranded on a tropical island—“because he’s just scrapping shit together, and it feels so real. There’s barely any spectacle. People want that right now. They just want to know how to survive when the world ends.”
As Beetz shook her head, laughing, Seimetz came over. Glover told her, “I’m pitching, but I’m doing a terrible job.”
“You are doing a terrible job,” Beetz said.
“But then Kevin Hart comes in!” he exclaimed, mugging like the comedy-film star. “And he fucking kills it! Money, please?”
Seimetz, who had caught Glover’s eye with her show “The Girlfriend Experience,” said afterward, “The great thing about Donald is he has a lot of ideas. But he has a lot of ideas.”
When they broke for lunch, Glover and Beetz rode to base camp in a Chevy Suburban driven by his outsized bodyguard, Jason Cornelius. “4 AM,” by 2 Chainz, played, and Glover rapped along, nailing every inflection. They started talking about trap music, a poundingly kinetic form of Atlanta rap that originated in the crack-and-weed dens known as trap houses. “The rhythm of it is interesting,” Beetz said, “but I feel abandoned by the lyrics. Rhyming ‘blunt’ with ‘blunt’ with ‘blunt’—”
“It’s music for making drugs by,” Glover explained, his brow furrowing. He lost his virginity to a trap song, and one of his goals for “Atlanta” is to make the show feel as vital as the music that constitutes half its soundtrack.
Cornelius said, “I agree with her, though. You want some more metaphorical language, like Jay-Z.”
“Jay-Z be saying the same shit, too!” Glover said. “O.K., take ‘The Race,’ by Tay-K. Play that fuck right now, if you got it.” As Cornelius searched Spotify, Glover explained, “Tay-K was sixteen and on the run for murder when he made this song. It’s a real Jesse James story.” He pulled up Tay-K’s photo on his phone as “The Race” began to boom. Glover said, “Look at this kid! He’s a baby! He never had a chance! Y’all are forgetting what rap is. Rap is ‘I don’t care what you think in society, wagging your finger at me for calling women “bitches”—when, for you to have two cars, I have to live in the projects.’ ”
“That makes me think differently about it,” Beetz said.
Glover stared off. “Young black kid in Texas with a murder on him,” he said, finally. “He’s definitely going to die, and it’s sad.”
Beetz told me that she adored Glover without beginning to understand him. “After the première of the show,” she said, “I asked Donald how he felt, and he said, ‘I’m a very complex person,’ almost apologetically, and walked away.” Glover explained, “The sound was all fucked up and the guy at the controls wouldn’t let me touch it, so it didn’t quite hit. Everyone else was super happy, but I couldn’t be, and I felt really mad at myself, because I was ruining it for everyone else.” He laughed. “To be honest, I was probably just high. I am complicated, though. People expect me to be one thing—‘You’re a musician!’ ‘You’re a comedian!’ ‘You’re a coon!’—and I was just feeling high and pinned down.” He feels constantly watched but rarely seen.
In the old days of television, when four networks dominated the industry, the survival standard was clear. A show thrived by attracting a huge audience, and it attracted a huge audience by being diverting yet comforting. You just needed that actor everyone liked, Tony Danza or Ted Danson, or a new spin on an old premise: he’s obsessive-compulsive or paranoid schizophrenic or has Asperger’s and she’s bipolar—but they all solve crimes or medical mysteries! David Simon, who wrote for the NBC procedural “Homicide” in the nineties, before he created “The Wire” and “The Deuce” for HBO, said, “ ‘Homicide’ pulled ten million people on a Friday night, and we were in third place, getting creamed. To stay on the air, you had to sell reassurance, with every story being resolved before the last commercial. Everything had to be bigger than people actually are—you had to have the most surprising people fucking and blow shit up in a ball of fire. And you could never have a majority black or Asian or Latino show, because you’d lose audience.”
“The Sopranos,” which arrived on HBO in 1999, established a new benchmark, verisimilitude; in the fifth episode, we saw the Mob boss Tony Soprano strangling an informant. That creative breakthrough allowed shows to aim for smaller but more fervent audiences, to traffic not in quirky heroes but in flawed Everymen prone to depression and savagery. It allowed adult drama, which was expiring as a film genre, to be reborn on television.
Nowadays, as sixty-one cable networks and streaming services seek to distinguish their entries among the four hundred and eighty-seven scripted shows in production, verisimilitude matters, but only as much as attitude and mood. Ambiguity has become a selling point, with nonlinear storytelling the new norm. Many dramas are designed to be solved or resolved online, where fans can collaborate to crack open the hidden Easter eggs. On “True Detective,” the bible—the document explaining the show to network executives—promised that it “reinvents the procedural form using a unique, layered story structure which braids multiple time periods and employs occasionally unreliable narration.” “Fargo” ’s bible declared that “Season One Is a Triangle,” only to playfully add, in a footnote, “Or wait. Maybe Season One is a circle.” Structure is the new Tony Danza.
After “Louie” débuted, in 2010, as a set of fractured episodes about the comedian Louis C.K.’s dreams and fantasies, comedies, too, began to experiment with form and tone. As a showrunner character declared on the Showtime comedy “Episodes,” justifying his humor-free approach, “Comedies don’t have to be funny anymore. . . . You just have to end after thirty minutes. That’s it, bang, you’re a comedy.”
While this expanded universe allowed for inventive shows about minorities, such as “Fresh Off the Boat” and “Transparent,” which Amazon judged a hit with only 1.5 million viewers, African-American programming remained stuck. Dramas like “Scandal” and “Empire” had proved that shows with black protagonists could generate both ratings and chatter on “Black Twitter,” but they were old-fashioned “adult soaps” whose characters were conspicuously bigger than people actually are. In sitcoms, there were few alternatives to such Tyler Perry confections as “House of Payne” and “For Better or Worse”—shotgun marriages of slapstick and melodrama. Kenya Barris, the creator of the ABC sitcom “Black-ish,” said, “Executives wanted more of the Tyler Perry model. They looked to make all our voices monolithic.”
Creative risk, for black sitcom creators, still felt unfairly risky. Issa Rae told me that when she co-created and starred in the HBO sitcom “Insecure,” about two black women friends in Los Angeles, she knew that “if it didn’t work I’d have closed a door for a lot of other people. It had to be great.” Even now that “Black-ish” is in its fourth season, Barris wonders if he dares to introduce what on a white show would be a standard device: a black-and-white dream episode. He said, “Every time you do something and it fails, it’s not just an episode of television that didn’t work—you have failed the culture.”
When Glover conceived of “Atlanta,” in 2013, he was prepared to fail spectacularly. But to fail spectacularly he had to first get on the air. He wrote the pilot accordingly. There was a standard cold open: a flash-forward to Alfred (played by Brian Tyree Henry) shooting a guy in a beef outside a liquor store. Then, after we were introduced to the main characters, including Earn’s withholding father (the winning character actor Isiah Whitlock, Jr.), we watched Earn spar about money and childcare with Van and work to establish his managerial bona fides with Alfred by paying a radio d.j. to play his new song. There was even some Twitter bait: a bow-tied guru who offered Earn a Nutella sandwich on the bus, and who, by TV logic, would inevitably return to guide him down some mildly surprising path.
“I knew what FX wanted from me,” Glover said. “They were thinking it’d be me and Craig Robinson”—the “Hot Tub Time Machine” actor—“horse-tailing around, and it’ll be kind of like ‘Community,’ and it’ll be on for a long time. I was Trojan-horsing FX. If I told them what I really wanted to do, it wouldn’t have gotten made.” Stephen Glover, Glover’s thirty-year-old brother and his closest collaborator on the show, said, “Donald promised, ‘Earn and Al work together to make it in the rough music industry. Al got famous for shooting someone and now he’s trying to deal with fame, and I’ll have a new song for him every week. Darius will be the funny one, and the gang’s going to be all together.’ That was the Trojan horse.”
The Glovers viewed the network’s notes—Can we see Earn be special? Where’s his “win”?—as meddlesome, and felt that the execs got excited about the pilot only after it tested well. But the C.E.O., John Landgraf, did tell Glover early on, “The parts that you’re worried we’re going to think are too weird—lean into those.” FX let him hire a young, untried, all-black writing staff, most of them members of Royalty, a crew of men in Glover’s circle who modelled themselves on the Kennedy clan. (Stephen Glover said, “We decided that we should all live like American royalty, a union of kings.”) The network also let Glover bring in his favorite music-video director, Hiro Murai, who’d never directed television. “If I were FX, I wouldn’t have hired me,” Murai said.
So the weirdness commenced. In the second episode, which Earn spent in jail, a funny scene of a mentally ill guy who spits toilet water on a cop pivots abruptly when he gets beaten at length, while the other prisoners try to pretend it’s not happening. In the episodes that followed, Alfred and Darius, rather than following Earn’s managerial advice straight to the top, ended up acting as his life coaches. Earn’s father vanished from the story—and so did the Nutella guru and the guy Alfred shot, his supposed ticket to fame.
“Trojan-horsing” is a term beloved among show creators, who believe that network executives want a dab of originality, but mostly for marketing purposes. When Jenji Kohan explained to NPR why she’d created the prison show “Orange Is the New Black” around the character of Piper, an attractive, upper-middle-class white woman, she said, “Piper was my Trojan horse. You’re not going to go into a network and sell a show on really fascinating tales of black women and Latina women and old women and criminals.”
In the metaphor, a thing that looks like a horse contains surprises for your enemies. In Glover’s version, a thing that looks like a horse turns out to be an alligator. He told his writers, “We’re the punk show—what’s the most punk thing to do?” Jamal Olori, a member of Royalty, told me, “We always said, ‘We want to fuck up television.’ Donald would teach us the rules so we could break them.”
“Atlanta” broke rules that most viewers hadn’t quite realized were rules. In comedies, jokes are underlined by closeups, but “Atlanta” ’s camera stayed aloof, serving not as an exclamation point but as a neutral bystander. The characters didn’t have histrionic reactions to the problem of the week; they just gave up a little more. Earn was an antihero, as is now customary, but, unlike Don Draper or Walter White or Olivia Pope, he wasn’t an expert in anything. He wasn’t a great manager or a great part-time boyfriend or, for that matter, a particularly promising human being. Curiously boyish in shorts and a backpack, he wasn’t even active, the minimal standard for television characters. He didn’t seem to do or want anything. He just watched and flinched and got yelled at to grow up.
The biggest innovation was that the narrative never advanced: Earn and Alfred made no headway. The lone moment of arrival felt like a setback. As the season progressed, we realized that Earn secretly wanted one thing very badly: a place to stay. In the final minute of the last episode, we see him for the first time in his only actual home—a cot in a storage unit. “When I saw all the episodes together, I hated the show,” Lakeith Stanfield, who plays Darius, said. “The pacing was strange, there was a lot of space between things, and I didn’t understand Darius. But as I watched it more it began to reveal itself to me.” David Simon said, “I felt like Donald Glover was doing an entire show of the moments we treasured on ‘The Wire’ ”—the asides between drug sellers on the corner, the pop-culture riffs—“where we were stealing one back from television. Watching it felt luxurious.”
The seventh episode, written and directed by Glover, broke format completely. It was an unbridled parody of Black Entertainment Television, centered on a “transracial” black teen-ager named Antoine, who, by practicing remarks like “Excuse me, what I.P.A. do you have on tap?,” is preparing to surgically transition into a thirty-five-year-old white man named Harrison. The only familiar character was Paper Boi, who appeared as a panelist discussing trans issues. And the episode’s commercials were fake ads for products such as Mickey’s Malt Liquor and Swisher Sweets, the cigarillos often used for blunt wraps. An animated spot for a fictitious cereal called Coconut Crunch-O’s ended with a white cop arresting a wolf for coveting the black kids’ Crunch-O’s, then kneeling on the wolf’s back and snarling at the kids to back off.
John Landgraf said, “The fact that Donald wasn’t going to be in the episode at all gave us pause. But I came to understand that he had a larger structure in mind than any of us knew. Donald and his collaborators are making an existential comedy about the African-American experience, and they are not translating it for white audiences.” If they were, he said, “the show would have white characters in it to say, ‘You, the audience, should relate to these black characters the way the white characters on the show do.’ ” (Issa Rae said that when she was making her Web series, “The Misadventures of Awkward Black Girl,” “someone told me, ‘White people watch if you put a white character in it.’ And it turned out it kind of was that simple.”)
Landgraf added, “I don’t have a problem with the Trojan-horse narrative if it’s important to Donald. We’re in the business of making pieces of commercial television that mask deeper artistic narratives.” On “Atlanta,” though, the mask feels flimsy. Glover said, “The hardest part is surprising FX every time. They need that to feel that you’re an authentic black person. I surprised them up front by telling them I wanted to make them money.” To soothe viewers, he devised a series of scenes in which Earn and Alfred and Darius sit on a discarded couch behind Alfred’s apartment and smoke weed—daffy moments that serve as “Atlanta” ’s version of the “Cheers” ritual when Norm walks in and everyone cries, “Norm!”
Glover understands that his sand castles have to be profitable, and he’s less surprised than FX is that “Atlanta” is the most watched comedy in the network’s history. The point he’s had trouble conveying, to the networks and studios and record companies, is that the sand castles people cherish most are the handmade ones with melted edges. With a bleak chuckle, he said, “Steve always reminds me, ‘FX didn’t want to do this show—you had to beg them. Fuck them!’ I like Landgraf, I’ve learned a lot from him, but FX is a business. It’s not there to make some kid from Stone Mountain, Georgia,’s dreams come true.”
I rang the bell at Glover’s house, in Atlanta’s increasingly hip Inman Park, for a very long time. The shades were drawn and there was no apparent pulse of life. Finally, Glover cracked the door, blinking. He’d been having his I.T. bands massaged to relieve stress, and he didn’t seem particularly happy that I’d kept our appointment. He told me that he found it draining to trust people, and each time we spoke I had the feeling of laboring to reëstablish a connection. “You do always start from zero with Donald,” his music manager, Fam Udeorji, told me. “He reads you every time he sees you, and, like an A.I. that does facial recognition, he’s processing so many faces he can’t always fully understand the nuances of emotion and the incentives behind them.”
The house felt like an encampment: a stroller thrust aside, boxes stacked by the door. Glover was wearing a white T-shirt and a brown wool cape and pants, like an off-duty ringmaster. After taking up a cross-legged perch in his living room, he called “Yo, Steve!” to his brother, who was living upstairs, but there was no answer. Growing up, Donald was light-skinned and sunny, and his friends were the white kids at his school for the performing arts; Stephen was darker-skinned and stoic, and his friends were the bused-in black kids at his school, which was not for the performing arts. The relationship between Earn and Alfred—the darker-skinned relative who plaintively says, “I scare people at A.T.M.s! I have to rap!”—is a rough parallel. Many of the show’s rawer moments are underpinned by real-life affronts that Stephen sustained; the second episode’s jailhouse beating stemmed from a day he spent in jail after being arrested for possessing a gram of weed. Glover said, “My consciousness began to change when I hung out with Steve as an adult, because he’s scarier to white people. It made me super-black.” He was incensed that Stephen had recently been unable to rent an apartment on Airbnb: “This woman turned him down, supposedly because his posture was bad—in the photo. O.K., he’s one of the two smartest people I know, and his only crime was he wanted to give you four thousand dollars!”
As the brothers grew up in Stone Mountain, just east of Atlanta, they came to share an understanding that life was a bad dream and that laughter was a way to wake yourself up. Glover’s father, Donald, Sr., was a postal worker, and his mother, Beverly, was a day-care provider. After they had Donald and Stephen, the couple took in numerous foster children and adopted two of them: some of the children had been molested, some had parents who were murdered, some would die. “We had a cousin with AIDS and we couldn’t keep her and save her,” Glover said. “All the drugs she needed were in New York City and California. That still feels like a family tragedy.”
The Glovers were Jehovah’s Witnesses. They believed that Satan controls life on earth, that only a hundred and forty-four thousand anointed Christians will be saved to Heaven with Jesus, and that we are living out the last days before Armageddon. Stephen Glover said, “We were wised up early to not celebrating our birthdays and that there was no Santa Claus and no magic. Our mom made us watch ‘Mississippi Burning’ when I was six, and she always warned me about wearing saggy pants and said, ‘If someone sucks your penis, come tell me.’ ” Glover said, “I know Mom was doing all that to protect us, but it gave me nightmares. I wouldn’t go into bathrooms alone or eat anything except turkey.”
Beverly Glover forbade all television but PBS—animal shows and slavery documentaries. Donald, Sr., sometimes let the kids watch Bugs Bunny cartoons and Bill Murray movies. Glover would secretly turn the television on with the sound low and tape episodes of “The Simpsons” on his Talkboy recorder so that he and Stephen could listen to them later: archeologists reconstructing the popular culture of their own time.
Glover announced early on that he wanted to attend N.Y.U.’s Tisch School of the Arts and then write for “The Simpsons.” That seemed unattainable, but so did most of his desires. When Nintendo 64 came out, in 1996, his mother declared it too expensive. Stephen Glover told me, “I said, ‘Oh, well.’ But Donald heard on Radio Disney that they were giving a Nintendo 64 away to the ninetieth caller every day for a week. He listened all week and kept calling in until he gauged the perfect time, and one day he ran upstairs and said, ‘I won it!’ He’s always been able to will what he wants.”
In Glover’s living room, his son, Legend, ran in clutching a plastic giraffe. Glover hugged him and fell backward. “Shoe, Daddy, there!” Legend cried, pointing at his own shoe. “That’s right,” his father said, holding him aloft.
As Legend bustled over to show me the giraffe, Glover said that he thinks of reality as a program and his talent as hacking the code: “I learn fast—I figured out the algorithm.” Grasping the machine’s logic had risks. “When people become depressed and kill themselves, it’s because all they see is the algorithm, the loop,” he said. But it was also exhilarating. When he was ten, he said, “I realized, if I want to be good at P.E., I have to be good at basketball. So I went home and shot baskets in our driveway for six hours, until my mother called me in. The next day, I was good enough that you wouldn’t notice I was bad. And I realized my superpower.” During a lunch break on set one day, in the gym of a Baptist church, I had watched Glover play 21 against five crew members. He made three long jumpers, then began charging the lane to launch Steph Curry-style runners—stylish, ineffective forays facilitated by the crew’s reluctance to play tough D. “It sounds like I’m sucking my own dick—‘Oh, he thinks he’s great at everything,’ ” he said now, leaning forward. “But what if you had that power?”
I asked why, given his talents and ambitions, he’d bothered to do a two-scene cameo as a small-time crook in “Spider-Man: Homecoming.” It was clear why Marvel and Sony, the studios involved, cast him. Kevin Feige, Marvel’s president, told me, “When we tested the film, even with that tiny role, Donald was one of the audience’s favorite characters.” (As Feige acknowledged, the decision was also inspired by an Internet campaign to make Glover the first black Spider-Man.) Glover said he took the role because “I learn so much. I learn how Marvel movies work, how to handle guest stars, how to make execs happy when they come on set. I gain some of your power. Only now I’m running out of places to learn, at least in America.”
When Glover directed “Atlanta” for the first time, on the BET episode, he said, “I wasn’t worried that I was going to shit the bed. I was only worried how people might take it, that I was just coming in as the creator and assuming I could be a director. I don’t look at what they do as easy.” He grinned, slowly. “I just look at what they do.” Hiro Murai told me that Glover’s aptitude could be galling: “The day before Donald directed, he said, ‘Hey, do you have any tips?’ I was mad, because I knew, You’re going to be fine—you’ll pick it up naturally, the way you pick up everything. And then he won an Emmy!” (Glover began his acceptance speech by saying, “First, I want to thank the great algorithm that put us all here.”)
Is there anything you’re bad at? “To be honest, no. Probably just people. People don’t like to be studied, or bested.” He shrugged. “I’m fine with it. I don’t really like people that much. People accept me now because I have power, but they still think, Oh, he thinks he’s the golden flower of the black community, thinks he’s so different.” He laughed. “But I am, though! I feel like Jesus. I do feel chosen. My struggle is to use my humanity to create a classic work—but I don’t know if humanity is worth it, or if we’re going to make it. I don’t know if there’s much time left.”
Legend offered him the giraffe and asked, “What does a giraffe say?” His father repeated the question, giving it serious thought. “I have no idea what a giraffe says.” Michelle passed through, very pregnant but serene, to collect Legend and head to Whole Foods. Glover had a nearly wordless exchange with her that conveyed concern for her health, the duty to remain with me, and a curiosity about dinner.
He stretched his legs, wincing. “I tell stories because that’s the best way of spreading information,” he said. “We’re all tricking and toying and playing with each other’s senses to affect this thing hidden inside our skulls.” He drew a circle in the air, then jabbed a finger, trying to penetrate it. “That’s what Earn is trying to do with Alfred—tell him a story so he can get into his understanding and make him do what he wants.” He pulled his hand back, sheepishly. “I just realized I’m drawing an egg-and-sperm kinda thing.”
Do you look up to anyone? “I don’t see anyone out there who’s better,” he said. “Maybe Elon Musk. But I don’t know yet if he’s a supervillain. Elon is working on ways for storytelling not to be the best way of spreading information.” Musk’s new company, Neuralink, intends to merge human consciousness with computers, allowing us to download others’ thoughts. “It will turn us into a connected macroorganism, but it will make our individual desires seem trivial,” Glover went on. “Sometimes I get mad at him—‘You think people are insignificant!’ But we probably are at the end of the storytelling age. It’s my job to compress the last bits of information for people before it passes.” He sighed. “The thing I imagine myself being in the future doesn’t exist yet. I wish it was just ‘Oh, I’ll be Oprah,’ or ‘I’ll be Dave Chappelle.’ But it’s not that. It’s something different and more, something involving fairness and restoring a sense of honor. Sometimes I dream of it, but how do you explain a dream where you never see your father, but you know that that’s him over your shoulder?” It was very quiet. “It’d be nice to feel less lonely.”
Amy Seimetz studied the playback of a Fastnacht scene and cracked up. The revellers were dressed in traditional German costumes—Bundhosen, dirndls, and papier-mâché animal masks—and Earn, wearing jeans and a white hockey-goalie mask, of the kind worn by the serial killer in “Friday the 13th,” looked totally out of place. Seimetz motioned Glover over to the monitor to watch, and he cracked up, too. “Such a bad idea,” he said, pleased.
Wearing the mask pushed up on his forehead, Glover wandered into the parking lot outside the set, a Moose Lodge in Griffin, Georgia, an hour south of Atlanta. It was a balmy evening, near sunset, and Seimetz was going to shoot the final scene for another episode across the road. “We use every part of the Moose,” Glover said dryly. Then he began to talk about a racial anxiety he’d experienced on set the previous night.
On African-American shows, racial anxiety often gets dramatized as a special episode about the N-word. On “Black-ish,” the Johnson family argued about its propriety, and Dre, the father, finally told his son—who’d been suspended from school for singing along to the word in Kanye West’s “Gold Digger”—to “hold off on saying it until you know the history of it, to make your own decision.” On “The Carmichael Show,” on NBC, a similar family debate ensued after a white friend of Jerrod’s greeted him with “My nigga!” Jerrod’s girlfriend, Maxine, said, “It’s the last word that so many black people heard as they were being hung from trees,” but Jerrod contended that “everyone should just use the word constantly, so much until it dilutes its power, it makes it meaningless.”
Glover said, of these episodes, “No black people talk to each other like that, or need to. It’s all for white people.” (“Black-ish” ’s audience is about one-fifth black; “Atlanta” ’s is half black.) FX told Glover to avoid the N-word in his pilot; the network’s compromise position was that only a white character who says “Really, nigga?” and “You know how niggas out here are” could use it. Recalling the dispute, Glover exclaimed, “I’m black, making a very black show, and they’re telling me I can’t use the N-word! Only in a world run by white people would that happen.”
On the phone call that finally resolved the matter, it was a white executive producer, Paul Simms, who argued successfully for the authenticity of the show’s use of the word. Glover had brought in Simms, the elder statesman on “Girls” and “Flight of the Conchords,” to serve as what black creators call “the white translator.” “You need the translator for the three-minute call after the meeting,” Barris explained. “It’s for when the execs call the white guy to say, ‘What exactly did Kenya mean there?,’ and to be reassured.” Since then, “Atlanta” has used the N-word unself-consciously, in a profusion of ways. This season, Alfred explains to Earn, “You gotta act like you better than other niggas so they treat you better than other niggas.” Darius chimes in, “Otherwise, you just look like . . . another nigga.”
Glover’s racial anxiety had been about skin color. In the German-festival episode, Van runs into Christina, a childhood friend who’s described in the script as biracial (“think Meghan Markle”), and they have a tense conversation about how Van “chose black” and Christina “chose white.” But when Glover saw Jessica Tillman, the actress he’d hired to play Christina, “I had a mini-panic,” he said. “She wasn’t light-enough-skinned for the role. I instantly felt I was being colorist, but I’m also needing to use her skin tone to tell a story—so, wait!” He laughed. After checking the politics with Stephen, his black translator, Glover decided that “she was light enough,” he said. “It helped that her hair was straighter than Zazie’s, so she could pass.” He frowned, working through the mystery, then went on, “Her skin looked so different under the lights. That made it totally clear that it’s all ethereal, it’s all bullshit, that color doesn’t mean anything in a vacuum. But we don’t live in a vacuum.”
Zazie Beetz had told me that she’s often cast for her light skin, as “a pop of color” in a role that could go to a white actress, and that she knew some fans of “Atlanta” had wanted Van to be darker-skinned. “I don’t know if I was cast off of talent instead of look,” she said. “That’s my insecurity.” Glover said that it was talent. “But I was also, like, ‘People are going to feel that way about her—and they should.’ We have to show the consequences.” He noted that his own skin color had surely influenced his career, beginning with his first job, as a writer on “30 Rock.” “I wondered, Am I being hired just because I’m black?” Tina Fey, the show’s creator and star, told me that the answer was in large part yes; she admired Glover’s talent but hired him because funds from NBC’s Diversity Initiative “made him free.”
Glover ambled over to where Beetz and Lakeith Stanfield and two other actors, all in party costumes, were walking up the road, which was doubling for a road near Tyler Perry’s old mansion in Atlanta, which was itself doubling for Drake’s mansion. It was now dusk, which was doubling for dawn. Glover looked on, watching for a certain ludic intensity, one hard to choreograph but easy to see. After the last take, Stanfield told Glover, “I didn’t think I’d feel that”—he bent over as if gut-punched—“this episode. But every episode has that moment. For me, it was the Bostrom guy.” Darius lays out for a fellow-partygoer the philosopher Nick Bostrom’s argument that future civilizations will surely have computers powerful enough to run simulations of how their ancestors lived. And so, Darius explains, that simulation would very likely be “indistinguishable from reality to the simulated ancestor, i.e., us.”
“That moment is like the hook in music,” Glover said. “It’s what tells you why you’re there.” “Atlanta” is oddly akin to “Black Mirror”: both shows suggest that life is out of control. On “Atlanta,” it’s not technology that’s the catalytic element, the intensifier of our predilection for self-delusion and misery—it’s racism and poverty. The alien power isn’t a watching eye but the absence of a watching eye. Glover and his staff write toward hypnotic images that encapsulate the resulting chaos: a black schoolchild in whiteface, cops swarming an Uber driver and shooting him dead, an invisible car that blasts through a clump of bystanders outside a club. Nick Grad, FX’s president of original programming, said, “When the special effect of the invisible car came in, we watched it, like, twenty times in a row.”
This sensibility is singular yet recognizable. Just as John Cheever’s epiphanies and apologias were stamped by drink and Paul Bowles’s hallucinatory quietude by hashish, so “Atlanta” ’s vibe is molded by weed. There’s a goofiness to the action, a dreamy awareness that reality is untrustworthy right now, but hold up, try this edible. Recognizing that quality, Lakeith Stanfield told me, “I decided to play Darius as a high version of myself. And now he’s become all the fantastical elements of Atlanta condensed into one person—this gateway to Freakville.”
“We do everything high,” Glover said. “The effortless chaos of ‘Atlanta’—the moments of enlightenment, followed by an abrupt return to reality—is definitely shaped by weed. When shit is actually going on, no one knows what the fuck is happening.” In this season’s first episode, “Alligator Man,” an alligator belonging to Earn’s uncle Willy crawls out a screen door to the swelling tones of the Delfonics song “Hey Love.” Hiro Murai said, “Donald’s scripts, of all the ones we get, make the most visual sense to me. With the alligator scene, I can tell it’s a tonal thing he wants to hit—it’s not about story mechanics but about a quality of light and of the onlookers’ expressions that’s strange and majestic and ethereal.”
Gazing down the dark road, Glover said, “The alligator walking out and the music blaring—I feel like that all of the time, so I’m going to make all of you feel like that.”
Glover once told me that he found Hansel and Gretel hilarious. “The witch’s whole conceit for getting the children trapped is so elaborate it’s funny: you build a house made of sweets, then lure them to it, then promise them soft beds and warm baths. There’s better, more efficient ways to steal kids!”
While at N.Y.U., Glover conceived of a revealing take on another classic kidnapping tale. As part of a group called Hammerkatz, he auditioned for a time slot at the Upright Citizens Brigade Theatre with a sketch he’d written, called “Black Peter Pan.” Glover’s winsome Peter tries to persuade the children to follow him to Neverland—but they’re afraid to, because he’s black. Owen Burke, the artistic director of U.C.B., said, “Donald played it so full of hope and wonder in the face of Wendy and her brothers’ racism—totally committed, completely hilarious. Every once in a while, you get that nineteen-thirties-guy-with-a-cigar moment when you just know, That kid’s going to be a star!”
It was clear that Glover would be a star—it just wasn’t clear, even to him, what kind of star he’d be. In 2006, when he was twenty-three and still living in an N.Y.U. dorm, he was hired to write for “30 Rock.” Tina Fey said, “Donald didn’t pitch for Tracy, the way you’d expect. He pitched for Kenneth.” Tracy Jordan was the eccentric African-American star of a sketch-comedy show; Kenneth was the ingenuous white NBC page who, in a nod to Glover’s background, is from Stone Mountain, Georgia. Glover said, “I did have more in common with Kenneth than with Tracy at that point—I was a wide-eyed kid, eager to please.”
After three years, having learned how to punch up scripts and manage writers and actors, he quit. Six days later, he landed the role of Troy, a washed-up jock, on “Community,” a new NBC sitcom about a gang of misfits who study together at a community college. Dan Harmon, the show’s creator, said, “By the end of Season 2, I literally was writing scenes that ended ‘and then Donald says something to button the scene.’ I’m a pretty narcissistic guy, so for me to do that I had to know that, one, he was more talented than I was and, two, he was a better person than I was, that he wouldn’t misuse his power over me.”
Chevy Chase, one of Glover’s co-stars, often tried to disrupt his scenes and made racial cracks between takes. (“People think you’re funnier because you’re black.”) Harmon said, “Chevy was the first to realize how immensely gifted Donald was, and the way he expressed his jealousy was to try to throw Donald off. I remember apologizing to Donald after a particularly rough night of Chevy’s non-P.C. verbiage, and Donald said, ‘I don’t even worry about it.’ ” Glover told me, “I just saw Chevy as fighting time—a true artist has to be O.K. with his reign being over. I can’t help him if he’s thrashing in the water. But I know there’s a human in there somewhere—he’s almost too human.” (Chase said, “I am saddened to hear that Donald perceived me in that light.”) Glover quit in the fifth season, too bored to do it anymore.
Glover explained his periodic career changes by saying, “Authenticity is the journey of figuring out who you are through what you make.” When he started doing standup, in college, his sets were about being a black guy with nerdy white-guy interests. He maintained his smiling persona over the years, but his material grew increasingly caustic. One bit was about how terrible children are, how they’re “tiny little Hitlers.” “Seriously, that’s why I wear condoms,” he said. “I’d much rather have AIDS than a baby.” I asked Glover how he feels about that bit now, as a father. “I was wrong,” he instantly replied. “Having AIDS is actually way cheaper than having a baby.”
Comedy didn’t allow him to express the sadness he’d begun to feel—about race, about fame, about simply being human—so he turned to music. Because of his comedy background, and because he took his stage name, Childish Gambino, from Wu-Tang Clan’s name-generating program, everyone expected parody rap. Instead, he offered earnest tracks about being bullied as a child and about suicidal thoughts—a counterpoint to rap’s hypermasculine mainstream. Fam Udeorji told me, “People thought Donald was a whiny dude who wasn’t into his blackness. And the shorts he wore onstage were so short they made my friends uncomfortable.” He added, “Often when I give Donald an assessment like that, he’ll turn it up more. His whole thing is to make the weird palatable.” But then, lest white people see Gambino’s emo-ness as a sign of cultural affinity, he slyly embraced rap’s braggadocio:
The more Glover entertained, the more he grew disenchanted with the business of entertainment. “Before my first album came out, I wanted people to like me, and to realize that I had good intentions,” he said. “Then I realized that no one has good intentions—we all just have incentives.” In 2013, he did a pop-up in Washington Square Park to promote “Because the Internet,” the second album of a trilogy for Glassnote Records. The event was intended as a low-key happening: Glover sat on a park bench and broadcast his songs to about a hundred N.Y.U. students. After he played the album’s single, “3005,” Glover said, the label’s founder, Daniel Glass, “kept screaming for us to ‘Play it again!’ I was, like, ‘No!’ He was ruining it with a cash grab.” He added that Glass “was trying to buy me Margiela clothes and shit, so I’d work hard for him—but I realized that when I wasn’t selling anymore he’d throw me out.” Glass told me that if he’d called for more “3005” it was “out of pure passion for the music,” and that it was his wife who provided the Margiela clothing—a sweater, bought on sale after Glover had admired a similar one worn by their son. He added, “That’s a weird comment when you’re nominated for Album of the Year, Record of the Year. I look at this as an incredible success!” Gambino’s eerily soulful single “Redbone” went quadruple platinum last year; Jordan Peele used it in the opening scene of “Get Out” to establish a haunting tone while also reassuring black audiences. But after his next album, for RCA, Glover plans to retire from the music business.
The year that “Internet” came out, Glover appeared in two episodes of HBO’s “Girls”—cast, he suspected, to placate critics of the show’s lily-white sensibility. His character was Sandy, the black Republican boyfriend of Hannah, played by Lena Dunham. When Hannah broke up with him, Sandy began pumping his shoulders to imitate her privileged cluelessness: “ ‘Oh, I’m a white girl, and I moved to New York and I’m having a great time, and, Oh, I’ve got a fixed-gear bike, and I’m going to date a black guy and we’re going to go to a dangerous part of town.’ ” Dunham told me that Glover improvised his lines: “Every massive insult of white women was one hundred per cent him. I e-mailed him later to say ‘I hope you feel the part on “Girls” didn’t tokenize you,’ and his response was really Donald-y and enigmatic: ‘Let’s not think back on mistakes we made in the past, let’s just focus on what lies in front of us.’ ”
In time, Glover’s eagerness for connection gave way to strategic deflection. After watching Matt Damon handle the publicity on their movie “The Martian,” in 2015, he perfected a talk-show-ready geniality. On Jimmy Fallon, he told a tale about being bit on the butt by a dog; on Conan O’Brien, about meeting a sexy coyote; on James Corden, about a seal that popped up beside his surfboard. When I wondered about the authenticity of those anecdotes, he said, “Your job is to be as interesting as possible without actually saying anything.” He grinned. “So, yeah, animal, animal, animal.” Yet it still felt as if he’d given away too much. “I’m scanned into ‘Star Wars’ now, my face and body,” he told me. “Who’s to say that at some point they won’t take that scan and say, ‘Let’s make another movie with Donald. He’s been dead for fifteen years, but we can do whatever we want with him.’ ”
He’d lost the key to his superpower: the invisibility suit that allowed him to be black in black settings and white enough in white settings, to be the unseen seer. “You walk into the party and realize you are the party,” he said. “It’s ‘The only reason I invited all these people is because I hoped you’d come.’ So then it’s just work for me—and, if it’s work, you should pay me. Loyalty becomes math: Does this person live and die by how much money I make? Does this person have children with me and do they care about those children? The equation hasn’t been proved wrong yet. I can count on two fingers the people who actually love me.”
On a misty night, Glover was at a Golden Globes-watching party in the Hollywood Hills. He stood in the kitchen, his back to the wall, having an amiably vehement argument with Stefani Robinson, a confident twenty-five-year-old who writes for “Atlanta.” He wore his white T-shirt and brown wool pants and had a straw hat slung around his neck.
They were discussing the Internet, which Glover declared horrible in every way. (Explaining why he had deleted his social-media presence, he told me, “I felt like social media was making me less human, and I already didn’t feel that human.”) “So why don’t you tell people that?” Robinson asked. Seven or eight other guests, white millennials in entertainment, stood around the kitchen island, listening reverently.
Glover’s eyes widened and he emphasized every word: “Because they would kill this nigga!” Everyone laughed. “Those corporations don’t want anyone to stop the money train.”
“So you know better but you’re keeping the truth quiet—doesn’t that make you complicit?”
“A coward, you mean?” Glover said. “No, it makes me human. All we’re here to do is survive and procreate, pass on our information.”
After carefully fixing a plate from the buffet (salad, pork, roasted vegetables), Glover headed to the terrace and sat by the fire pit. As he ate, he stuck his right sneaker, a white Adidas Yeezy Powerphase Calabasas, into the pit. “I’m going to burn my foot off,” he said, watching the flames surround it. The other guests, in a glass-walled den off the terrace, were watching the Globes. He pulled his sneaker out just before it scorched.
Glover has a quizzical view of the relationship between awards and attainment. Even before the first season aired, he declared, “The second season of ‘Atlanta’ will be a classic.” But he’d also told me, “A lot of this season is me proving to people that I didn’t get those Emmys just because of affirmative action.” At Glover’s birthday party, in September, he and Brian Tyree Henry had a loud exchange about the topic. “It was just rage,” Henry told me. “Because at the end of the day, after we win all these Emmys and get all this love, as soon as the show is over we’re just niggas to you. We were drunk and high, and I was getting really dark. I made Donald come back to my house to keep talking about it, and Donald just kept coming back at me: ‘Really, Brian? Really?’ ”
Glover said, “To Brian, the basic fact that white people don’t want their feelings hurt so we have to make everything palatable to them is really upsetting. I used to feel the anger he feels about it, anger to the point of tears. Now it’s just boring to me. If Brian is Magneto, I’m Professor X”—the X-Men mutants modelled, respectively, on Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr.
Stefani Robinson had wandered over to listen in. She brought up “Twelve Years a Slave,” the 2013 film that won the Academy Award for Best Picture. “It’s all about Benedict Cumberbatch, but white people don’t see that,” she said.
Glover nodded. “If black people had made that movie,” he said, “they wouldn’t focus on the evil white dude, Michael Fassbender, but on Cumberbatch, who knows slavery is wrong, but who still takes advantage of it—which makes him the more painful, horrible monster. On our show, we sometimes have a problem with white actors playing what they think we want them to be: the villain. But it’s more painful if you think you’re not the villain.” Returning to the film, he said, “And there definitely wouldn’t be a Brad Pitt character who comes in and saves the black guy and makes white people feel good about themselves.” A low murmur came from the den.
Didn’t black people actually make “Twelve Years a Slave”? “Yeah,” Glover said. “But in the white system.” He picked up a rock from the fire pit, then dropped it and blew on his fingers. “If ‘Atlanta’ was made just for black people, it would be a very different show. But I can’t even begin to tell you how, because blackness is always seen through a lens of whiteness—the lens of what white people can profit from at that moment. That hasn’t changed through slavery and Jim Crow and civil-rights marches and housing laws and ‘We’ll shoot you.’ Whiteness is equally liquid, but you get to decide your narrative.” For the moment, he suggested, white America likes seeing itself through a black lens. “Right now, black is up, and so white America is looking to us to know what’s funny.” In “Get Out,” a blind white art dealer tells Chris, a black photographer whose body has been auctioned off for use by whites, “I want your eye, man—I want those things you see through.”
Robinson sank into the cushions and said, “What’s frustrating to me is that when Adam Sandler does ‘The Waterboy,’ about poor whites, he doesn’t have to worry about ‘What are poor whites going to think?’ ”
“Or ‘What are black people going to think? Are other black people going to call me a coon?’ ” Glover said.
“If I was the white version of me, I’d be, like, ‘My company has a death clause,’ ” he went on. “If we’re not doing what we’re supposed to be doing, we should shut down.” Why not put in a death clause as the black version of you—as, in fact, you? He laughed in disbelief. “The system is set up so only white people can change things,” he said. “If I gave a dog an iPhone, it couldn’t use it, because a dog doesn’t have an opposable thumb—that’s true of everything made for white people. I can say there’s a problem, you can all laugh at it, but it has to be a group of you guys who change it, because it was made by and for you.” He went on, “In a weird way, I feel bad for white people. You guys have put yourselves in the adult position, but you refuse to see it—you’re so lazy. Paying reparations is realistic, but you just don’t want to do it, so you don’t let yourself see how things are. So, yeah, I can’t help you anymore.”
Noting that he often spoke about how life would be different if he were White Donald, I asked Glover how our conversations would be different if I were black. He gave me a considering look. “We’d have a language we both understood, and you’d know me better,” he said. “But as Black Tad you’d only be in a position of talking to me because you were good at placating a white audience. As a black person, you have to sell the black culture to succeed. So I’d try to trust Black Tad, but it’s really up to him whether he’d sell us out.”
Fam Udeorji had told me, “White Donald would be James Franco—a guy doing a lot of different shit, none of it interesting.” I asked Glover if there was a possibility, given his belief that the black experience was more interesting—albeit far more painful—than the white experience, that White Donald wouldn’t have ended up where Black Donald has. Very softly, he said, “Would you rather be a person who has all the opportunities but can’t see them? Or a person who can see all the opportunities but can’t have them?” Probably the latter, I said. You? “Yeah, there’s something beautiful about being able to see it all.”
He continued, “I went to school with white people who had less talent than me—because I’m talented as fuck—and they’re doing way better than me. I went to N.Y.U. with Lady Gaga.” There was a burst of laughter and applause from the den. “Now, CBS ran Grammys ads this week, and I’m one of the hotter acts, and they had a visual of the performers on the show: Lady Gaga, Pink, and me. Only they showed some black kid from a fan video—it’s not even me. I was, like, Fuck this, fuck them, I’m not going to do the show!” After a moment, he added, quietly, “The sad thing is I’m going to do it, because black people don’t get that chance very often.”
He picked up a rock from the fire pit, then dropped it. “It’s hot! I didn’t know it was the same rock.” Looking at his singed fingers, he said, “Chris Rock told me, ‘Man, they wouldn’t have let me make your show back in the day.’ I’m a little better than Chris, because I had Chris to study. And now I am actively looking for the black female to replace me.” Robinson studied him over the flames. “I’m going to die someday, I hope. Then I won’t have all this pain and anguish and pressure. And someone better will replace me. If God exists, all she really wants is a conversation.”
In January, Glover began editing “Atlanta” at the show’s postproduction offices, a one-story house in Hollywood whose windows were masked by black sheets. Aside from Adobe editing consoles in the front bedrooms, the décor was minimal: couches, rolling office chairs, a sad plant or two. Ibra Ake, a writer on the show, dropped by and said, “This feels like a trap house.” Glover grinned and said, “It basically is.”
Glover and Hiro Murai crisscrossed the hall, supervising episodes, tidying the seeming aimlessness and spritzing in ambiguity. One morning, they watched a cut of the season première, “Alligator Man.” Uncle Willy—the alligator’s owner, a has-been musician a little too comfortable in his bathrobe—is played indelibly by the comedian Katt Williams, who’d been enduring a rough career patch when Glover hired him for the role. “Katt’s the shit,” Glover said to Murai. “I told him, ‘I’m going to try to get you an Emmy for this.’ He said, ‘A’ight, we’ll see. You the only nigga who can say that right now.’ ”
Murai said, “Good on you for holding on to that vision. They were all saying, ‘When’s the last time you saw Katt Williams not in jail?’ ”
Glover sat on the couch, stone-faced, wearing a stately brown cardigan and his straw hat, as everyone else in the room cracked up repeatedly and then tranced out to Uncle Willy’s alligator. Glover told me that his approach to editing was “to force the eating of the whole cake.” In one sequence, as Darius describes the mythic newspaper-headline figure known as Florida Man, we see a montage of his berserk acts. Glover said, “It was important to me that we see him shooting an unarmed black teen first, that you get the sting of that before we see him beating a flamingo to death, which is just funny.”
The episode was twenty-nine and a half minutes, well above the customary twenty-four or so. “Just send it in and see what happens,” Glover said. “FX will tell us what they want to cut, and we’ll say no.” He asked to see the opening montage again. As aerial tracking shots of parking lots and dilapidated houses and playgrounds rolled past, he nodded along to the soundtrack, a trap song by Jay Critch called “Did It Again.” “It has that Tay-K feel,” he said approvingly, referring to the jailed teen-ager, whose music he had laid in later in the episode.
The second season takes its name from the pre-holiday period known in Atlanta as “robbin’ season.” Darius explains the etymology to Earn in the first episode: “Christmas approaches, and everybody’s got to eat.” The show’s aperture widens this year—each main character is the focus of his or her own episode, and several new characters come and go—but, if Season 1 was a dream, Season 2 is a nightmare. Referring to a moment when one old friend robs another, Glover said, “That scene is so sad to me. That’s what it is when you’re at the bottom—there’s a knife between you, and whoever doesn’t pick up the knife is going to die.”
After lunch, Glover returned to an editing suite and sat on the floor, surrounded by his team, to watch the episode where Van and Earn go German. It played in near-silence: an early cut had stripped out the dialogue that established why the couple were going to the festival, as well as the stoned byplay that established that they had something together. The absences made the episode a creepy, cryptic Walpurgisnacht; it felt, in its exaggerated distillation of the show’s most distinctive qualities, almost like a parody.
As the producers paused the playback and discussed how to make the episode more enjoyable—how to make it more TV—Ibra Ake eyed the shot onscreen: a reveller wearing what the script called an “innocent child face” mask, whose “black eyeholes peer into Earn’s soul.” It looked more uncanny than innocent. “I feel like people are going to be writing essays twenty years from now on all the masks in the show,” Ake said. Glover rolled his neck, anticipating the treasure hunt: “Starting with why Earn is wearing a white mask.”
Glover had told me, “I’m trying to make my work more and more accessible. Christianity is super accessible.” But there’s little redemption in “Robbin’ Season.” In the first episode, Earn—trying to fit in at Alfred’s place, in the hope that he can crash there for a while—pulls out a gold-plated gun that Uncle Willy gave him. Alfred and Darius convulse with laughter. Then a friend of Alfred’s named Tracy comes in and says, “You better get rid of that gun, nigga!” The way Tracy plops down on Alfred’s couch makes it clear that he’s living with Alfred now, too—which puts Earn back out in the cold.
Months earlier, Hiro Murai had told me, “There aren’t any couch moments in this season, but I’m trying to build one in. That’s the only place where Earn gets a small win.” He managed one late in the season—a reunion on the discarded couch outside—and, he said, “I think it’s going to feel really good.” However, Glover told me, “The couch moment is definitely not like ‘Ahh, we’re all back together.’ ” He addressed the imagined audience: “Stop being nostalgic! Because I didn’t grow up with Santa Claus, people always tell me, ‘I feel sorry for you.’ I feel sorry for you, because you were lied to your whole life, and now you have to repeat the lie about Santa Claus to your kids every Christmas to feel whole. The truth is you’re definitely going to die alone.” He smiled faintly, relenting: “I know, I get it—the couch is what makes it a TV show. Just like you need Christmas. Otherwise it’s all random chaos and the story doesn’t make sense.”
There are limits even to Glover’s powers of invention. “The ‘Atlanta’ story has been told a bajillion times,” he acknowledged. “ ‘Boyz n the Hood,’ ‘The Godfather’—they’re all the same story.” I suggested that you could even see the setup of “Atlanta” as “Seinfeld,” except that the George character—the butt of the joke—is at the center. Glover said, “Sure, it’s black ‘Seinfeld.’ You’ve got the kooky guy, the guy who’s trying to make it, the neurotic dude, and the carefree ex. But it’s not just that.” He continued, wearily, “There are so few stories available to us, though. That’s why I’m not going to be making music much longer, and ‘Atlanta’ won’t interest me much longer. Best-case scenario, the show is just a show that makes people aware. It’s not going to do the transformative work we’ve been talking about.”
Dan Harmon told me, “Donald is no longer in love with everything about the world. But I’ve never said to him, ‘You seem sad or darker now,’ because, for all I know, that’s growth.” Glover said that, as he’d grown, he’d realized that being a savior was impossible to reconcile with being an artist. “Everyone’s been trying to turn me into their woke bae”—millennial slang for an enlightened boyfriend. “But that’s not what I am. I’m fucked up, too—and that’s where the good shit comes from.”
Glover positioned his straw hat, poised for departure. “In another universe,” he said, “there might be a doppelgänger Donald who wears a cowboy hat. But I’ve decided to experience the loop in this form. It’s a very complex level of energy compared to a giraffe, or a metal alloy. I do think I’ll go back to a stasis state at some point, and it might not be that long from now.” He went on, reassuringly, “I wouldn’t want anyone to feel bad. It’ll be like I was at a big party, and everyone’s enjoying themselves, wandering around—and suddenly you all start going, ‘Where’s Donald?’ ” He acted out the concerned partygoers: “ ‘Where’d he go?’ ‘I saw him, I talked to him!’ ‘He was just here a little while ago!’ ” And then the collective shrug: “ ‘Oh, well, I guess he slipped out.’ ” ♦
