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And like the protagonist of Jordan Peele’s Get Out (which came out between the series’ first and second seasons), Darius is clever and on high alert, adaptable to change yet unperturbed, in a practiced way, by the danger of the situation. When he pulls up to the luxe mansion that matches the address that’s been given, he’s listening to Stevie Wonder’s “Sweet Little Girl.” He doesn’t know it yet, but Darius is about to become a Black man in a horror movie, a loaded role within the history of the genre. He stops at a store where he buys a trucker hat with a Confederate flag that says “Southern Made,” then changes it to “U mad” with a red Sharpie. When the episode begins, Darius is driving a U-Haul out to a secluded area to pick up a piano with rainbow-colored keys that he found online. Viewers already knew from experience that Darius is always getting mixed up in off-the-wall scenarios - like trying to make money by trading a sword for a dog to breed puppies - yet nothing could prepare us for Teddy. “Teddy Perkins” is the first chapter of Atlanta to center solely on Stanfield’s Darius, the breakout character who’s like a stoner version of Kramer from Seinfeld (the only sitcom reference that does apply to the series) doling out conspiracy theories and obscure references to side stories that are both hilarious and bizarre. Yet, from the start, this episode was different.
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By the midpoint of season two, the surreal series about an Atlanta-based rapper and his crew had already featured an invisible car, a mythical German creature, a live alligator, Black Justin Bieber, and a drug-dealing, murderous re-imagining of the hip-hop group Migos. Early on, Glover compared the series to Twin Peaks, and later, to an obscure direct-to-video Looney Tunes movie. When it began in 2016, series creator, writer, and star Donald Glover used a back-lot couch as a recurring set to lend Atlanta a sitcom-y bit of familiarity for nervous network execs, but this was a Trojan horse: he was never aiming to make the next Friends or Cheers. For me, it was when I realized, as the episode aired for the first time in April 2018, that it was going to be an uninterrupted 35 minutes, a slab of rubber-band-tight tension presented without commercial breaks.Įven before we met Teddy Perkins, Atlanta was never going to be a run-of-the-mill show. For others, it’s when Teddy shows Darius ( Lakeith Stanfield) his museum room, complete with a faceless mannequin stand-in for his abusive, idolized father. For some, it’s when they realize that the titular shut-in’s Winnie the Pooh-like voice sounds unnervingly familiar.
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This essay is part of our series Episodes, a bi-weekly column in which senior contributor Valerie Ettenhofer digs into the singular chapters of television that make the medium great.Įach person who watches the Atlanta episode “ Teddy Perkins” has a different what-the-fuck threshold, a point at which the sheer ambitious absurdity of the entry becomes crystallized in our minds as TV history in the making.