Most the people reading this have no idea who Donald Glover is, if you look at his IMDb page it will be mostly comedy. If you taken a deeper dive into google, you will see Childish Gambino, Glovers’ alter ego rap name. The first song I heard of his was Freak and Greeks and I was hooked, then he went on to star in “Community”, a criminally underrated NBC comedy. Gambino fun rhymes in “Freaks and Greeks” and hilarious scene on Community only scratch the surface of Donald Glover.
Glover has been relatively quiet the past few years since leaving Community, he had some smaller roles in drama films like “Martian” but nothing crazy. Its because he has been working on his next project “Atlanta”, which premiered on FX September 9th. I have been waiting for this show for about a year. I got to see a few scene at my past job during a pitch for FX and the task was to create a media plan for a new show “Atlanta”. Already a fan, I was stoked to get get a few scenes before everyone else.
We are a few episodes in and it is time to get on board. The storyline focuses around Earnest (Glover) and his strive to make something of himself in Atlanta. He “lives” his baby momma and his daughter. They are kind of together kind of not, but Earn is dead broke. His cousin just dropped a hit single under the rap name Paper Boy and Earn wants to manage him of course. Don’t worry this isn’t an Entourage/Ballers type show of girls and money. It is actually real, it shows that the grind to make it in the Atlanta rap game is hard and living in Atlanta might be even harder.
I am a typical suburban white boy rap fan so I have no idea about this struggle but this show has me hooked because it is different. There might not be shocking heart pounding moments on the show but if the first episodes are any indication this show has real staying power. You can understand why it has taken a few years for this project to get off the ground. Glover wanted this to feel authentic and not your typical Hollywood fame story. The characters probable won’t make it big and is a better example of how life is. Set your DVRs and catch up on the first 3 eps (only 30 min long). It airs Tuesday at 10 on FX
Also published on Medium.