Atlanta: Season 2

One of the best and worst parts about recording your pop culture takes on a blog for ten consecutive years is the ability to look back on old takes and either reminisce fondly or cringe. I have very few true "regrets" about anything I've said on this blog or elsewhere since, say, 2010 - and if I did, woof, I would hastily edit and delete such things - but one take I am borderline ashamed of having is, two years ago, ranking Atlanta all the way down at #25 on my ranked list of TV in 2016. That's behind things like the seventh season of Archer, the first season of Baskets, and the first half of the third season of The Affair. Oh dear!

I won't make that mistake again! This isn't a make-up call, but yeah, more than a third of the way into 2018, Atlanta is the best show of 2018, and an improvement over its first season, which I had grossly underrated at first glance.

There's a whole thing I could get into, and would even like to get into, about black America, white America, Donald Glover, bubbles, privilege, perspective - forget it. I don't have the skill or the patience to find all the words right now, and I'd only look foolish trying to extrapolate a big lesson from all this.

Suffice it to say that every single episode of this season of television kept me attentive and interested, even though all of them were basically standalone episodes. Every week was a goddamn delight this season, albeit some more than others, and plenty of them more accurately described as "horrifying" than "delightful."

I loved this season of television. I loved each episode, and I love the bigger picture they all combined into, the total that's proverbially greater than the sum of its parts. I mean, I'm not sure if it was greater than its parts here, because, man, what good parts! But yeah. The second season of Atlanta absolutely sets the bar for television in 2018 thus far. We'll see what the finale of The Americans has in store, and you can never count out The Handmaid's Tale, and, oh shit, Arrested Development is back in just two weeks, so it's not entirely implausible to think Atlanta could drop all the way to, like, #4 within two months or so. But for now, it's the best show of 2018.