Last night Donald Glover offered the first taste of the third season of Atlanta, and things seem a little tense. Subtlety tweeting out “Happy Halloween,” Glover shared the link for the Brooklyn-based website Gilga.com, which connected viewers to the first minute-long teaser from the long-awaited season (To note: The website is currently under construction and as a result is only a “nite-site” with operational hours from 8 p.m. to 3 a.m.).
Over eerily quiet clips of still art museums, closing elevator doors, empty streets and homes, Sun Ra’s “It’s After The End of the World” bellows through the desolate corridors. The teaser ends on a shot of Paper Boi (played by Brian Tyree Henry) staring blankly ahead, donning a shirt embellished with the word “FAKE” as servants stand facing the wall behind him. It’s a masterclass in intrigue and suspense.
The second season finale of Atlanta aired in May of 2018, only to be followed by a slew of delays—which included the pandemic. Since then, Glover has signed a robust multi-year deal with Amazon and released another album under the moniker Childish Gambino. The third and fourth seasons of Atlanta were shot and written together, with one season set in Atlanta and the other in Europe.
In 2018, writer and producer Stephen Glover (and brother of Donald) said the third season will focus on more “women-centric” stories—a change of pace from the predominately male focused storylines. At the 2018 Emmys FYC screening, Donald Glover said Atlanta’s third season is akin to one particular Ye album.
“I align the seasons I think, to me, like Kanye records,” Glover said. “I feel like this is our Graduation. This is probably our most accessible but also the realest—an honest version of it—and I feel like the most enjoyable, like the third album. We were all on iMessage together and kind of talking about it, and I think people were really hungry to like beat ourselves, which is great.”
There’s no set release date just yet, but Atlanta officially returns in 2022. In the meantime, catch up on our reviews from the second season.
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