'Atlanta' Episode 5, Season 1 Review

Image from FX

By Darian Scalamoni

            This week’s installment of Atlanta might have been the funniest yet. Not much dramatics were involved as all three of our leads got into relative hijinks that led to laughs. Earn and PaperBoi headed to a celebrity charity basketball game to help boost interest in the rapper who is attempting to go more mainstream. This leads to each of them getting involved in stunts in which they’re bound to get into trouble. Earn crashes an agent party and PaperBoi hates Justin Bieber. Yes, you read that right. With the cousins out and about trying to promote themselves, Darius heads to the gun range to fill his boredom filled day without his buddies.

            Now I will start by saying that we learn absolutely nothing about any of our characters within this episode which would make you think it’s one of the worst installments this season, but I disagree. Glover does his best at creating these themes and lightly playing them out for the viewer to figure out, which is great because he’s not dumbing everyone down. Earn’s plot for this week leads to him being mistaken by an agent for one of the celebrities within the basketball game. This seems to be a commentary on how little black people there are within the agency game and how anyone of them wearing a suit at an event like the one Earn was at seems to mean they’re important. Jane Adams (Hung) plays the agent that mistakes Earn for another man named “Alonso”. She actually helps him get into the meeting and he grabs contact information for other agents before she has a hilarious monologue where she freaks out on him for being the reason she was fired from her agency in the first place.

            For PaperBoi’s plot, he feuds with R&B/Pop sensation Justin Bieber, but its meta textual as the character is black but very much resembles the actual recording artist of the same name. Now this one I think was just a bit of an attack on the mega popstar about how as a celebrity, he had gotten away with miles of leeway in the past. PaperBoi doesn’t like all the attention that Bieber is getting from the media so he begins to frustratingly turn a charity basketball game into a one-on-one streetball affair. This leads to a fistfight on the court and continues to sink PaperBoi as a reliable celebrity personality since he shot someone in episode one.

            Darius’ plot is much simpler in terms of getting an idea out to the audience. With his friends out doing their thing, he decides to head to a shooting range to kill some time. The interesting thing is that instead of his paper target being of a human shape, it’s in the shape of a dog. Now, for all the animal lovers who are reading this, I’m sorry but try to understand the significance of this subtext and how funny it really is. Darius is threatened after other men in the range notice he’s shooting at a dog poster, yet, they shoot guns at target’s shaped as human beings. It makes for a perfect laugh out loud moment for everyone who is seeing the joke.

            With all these hilarious moments, Atlanta this week seems more like a comedy than it is in previous episodes. Granted, this installment wasn’t like the previous weeks but it definitely added a different dynamic to the show.

8.5/10