【Secret Confessions (2025) Week 8 Highlights Episode 46】

If you've ever seen — or Secret Confessions (2025) Week 8 Highlights Episode 46listened — to the countless projects on Donald Glover's résumé, FX's new fall dramedy Atlanta might feel a bit unconventional.

It's nearly the opposite of the genre-bending comedy Community, in which Glover won fans over as a lovable, meme-able jock who's secretly a giant nerd. And it's even further from the razor sharp wit of NBC's longstanding staple 30 Rock, on which Glover served as a writer for six years.

SEE ALSO: Donald Glover is coming back to TV in a comedy about Atlanta's rap scene

No, Atlanta is an emotionally charged series that leans on its simple, yet crafty, comedy as a mere accent to its gripping and almost depressing narrative. And while it seems incredibly far removed from the kind of comedy that propelled Glover into stardom, don't take "different" to mean "bad."

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Rather Atlanta -- the third episode of which airs tonight at 10 p.m. -- is a show that excels on multiple levels, one that takes a deep and important look at how race, culture and the daily life of the city it uses as its title and backdrop confound upon The American Dream. It's the closest, and most earnest, look at the modern millennial "how to make it" narrative as filtered through the lens of black life in Atlanta. In fact, it does it so well that it makes you think, "Why the hell hasn't anyone done this before?"

Few have tried, but not many pay as close attention to detail as well as Glover does. The show follows Earn (Glover), a "homeless" yet brilliant Princeton dropout who just can't seem to catch the breaks he needs to cash out of his life of couch surfing and provide for his family. He's crashing with his girlfriend, Van — with whom he shares a daughter — and sells credit cards at the local airport to get by (spoiler: he isn't all too great at it).

He latches onto the rising success of his cousin, Alfred, known to the local hip-hop scene as the up-and-coming rapper Paper Boi (Brian Tyree Henry), and earns the opportunity to act as his cousin's manager after some sole-burning hustling lands Paper Boi's ironic-but-actually-kind-of-catchy viral single on the local airwaves.

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But just as soon as that relationship begins to blossom, it also becomes problematic. After Alfred pulls a gun and shoots someone (a scene brilliantly accented with an onlooker yelling "WORLDSTAR!") in an altercation outside a convenience store, Earn quickly gets caught tying to balance working with his cousin to make a buck while trying to keep other aspects of his life at arm's length.

It's one-part comedy, one-part romance and two-parts drama. It balances laugh-out-loud moments — usually produced by fellow rap entourage member Darius, played by Keith Stanfield — with grittier bits of tension. It presents Atlanta front and center, and populates the setting with vibrant and colorful characters that give it an extraordinary sense of place. Not one person onscreen is a prop, and everyone has a personality.

It builds upon that with sharp, creative and natural dialogue, allowing cast members like Stanfield, who very much could break out as a star of the series, to shine in the spotlight around Glover — who often cedes camera time to those around him.

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Perhaps what's best about Atlantais that it dares to depict what most others don't. I dare you to count the number of actors, let alone extras, who are white. Atlantapresents its world as is, and doesn't bother to lean heavy handedly in one direction or another. In its second episode, a black man who's said to have a mental illness is beaten by a white cop in a police precinct. And rather than dwell on the moment, Atlantapushes past it and dares the audience to make its own conclusion. It's the type of TV you rarely see, but the type that's so important when dropped into the context of current day life.

But calling this a show that's necessary in the current political climate is a bit cheap. The same goes for its place in modern popular culture, where an important and perhaps necessary discussion of race is being overshadowed by the act of sitting during the national anthem. Truth is, Glover didn't really have politics in mind when creating this show, according to what he told New York Magazine.

“The No. 1 thing we kept coming back to is that it needs to be funny first and foremost," Glover told New York Magazinein August. "I never wanted this shit to be important. I never wanted this show to be about diversity; all that shit is wack to me."

Glover made Atlantato be good TV. It's just also the kind of good TV that's necessary, right now.