Atlanta season 1's sweetest move was an old 30 Rock move: it never tried to sell Paper Boi as God's gift to the trap scene

This is the first of 12 or 13 blog posts that will be posted on a monthly basis from now until this blog's final post in December 2017.

I was skeptical about Donald Glover's Atlanta when FX first announced in 2014 that it picked up Glover's creation, his first TV series since his departure from Community, the offbeat cult favorite where he continually killed it each week as Troy Barnes, a high-school football star trying (and failing) to suppress his nerdy side (like that time when Troy, in what has to be my favorite acting moment from Glover on Community, was so excited to be in the presence of his childhood hero LeVar Burton that he turned catatonic). A half-hour comedy about a trap rapper and his manager cousin trying to get by in the rap game? Disquieting visions of "Entourage for the Atlanta trap scene" danced in my head when FX first hyped Atlanta. The world doesn't need another half-hour piece of boring lifestyle porn where the lead characters constantly bang anything that breathes in the most opulent of settings and the storyline with the biggest stakes would be "Is Vince Paper Boi doing or not doing the movie A3C?"

Another disquieting vision I had was that Atlanta was going to be a weekly half-hour ad for Glover's musical career as Childish Gambino. Glover is a good example of an actor/rapper whose beats, frequently provided by Community and Creed score composer Ludwig Göransson, are solid, but his bars leave a lot to be desired. I was never a fan of Gambino's corny verses about his Asian fetish.

Gotta have fetishized at least 3 asian chicks before u can really appreciate Childish Gambino's music

— Desus Nice (@desusnice) October 31, 2013

I caught up on Atlanta season 1 on FX on demand, about a few weeks after the season concluded, during a couple of breaks between chapters for a manuscript I've been working on since August (chapters that I, by the way, ended up having to delete from the manuscript because I found myself thinking, "This material isn't gonna work as a YA novel anymore. A Jim Rockford-type Pinoy should be the audience surrogate, not a precocious Richie Brockelman-type Pinoy," so I got rid of all the teenage characters). Atlanta, which took home the Best Comedy Series and Best Actor in a Comedy trophies at the Golden Globes earlier this month, exceeded my expectations. As a half-hour single-camera comedy about the rap game, thankfully, it's more Taxi than Entourage.

Sure, Atlanta is frequently funny (three words: secret revolving wall), but Glover and his writing staff's brand of humor is tinged with Taxi-style melancholy, particularly about how working-class adult life often feels like you're running in circles. That melancholy reflects Glover's belief, as he once said during a 2016 Television Critics Association press tour panel, that "you watch Master of None and it's a very optimistic look at millennialism, [but] I'm pessimistic about it. I feel like we kind of fucked up."

There's nothing lifestyle-porny about Atlanta. Neither are there any moments of blatant product placement for Awaken, My Love!, the surprise Gambino album Glover dropped one month after the Atlanta season finale, save for a cameo by the Awaken, My Love! cover artwork on a bookshelf in the "Juneteenth" episode. The non-rap Awaken, My Love! is also the first-ever Gambino release I've genuinely liked from start to finish, aside from whatever the fuck Bino was doing with his voice during "California."

The show is an exploration of, as Joshua Rivera put it in GQ, "the stress and pain of being broke," particularly when that broke-ass person is both a creative and a POC, like Earn Marks, Glover's Ivy League dropout character, and, to a lesser extent, his cousin Alfred (Brian Tyree Henry), a.k.a. the trap rapper known as Paper Boi (not to be confused with Paperboy, who recorded the 1992 one-hit wonder "Ditty"), who's more economically stable than Earn, thanks to income from drug dealing, but he's not exactly on the level of Future/Gucci Mane-type wealth yet. "Ballin," singer/songwriter Bibi Bourelly's current ode to finding ways to "treat yo'self" when your savings account is empty, could be an unofficial theme song for the daily hustle of either Earn, who becomes Alfred's manager, or teaching assistant Van (Zazie Beetz), Earn's ex and the mother of his baby daughter (I wouldn't be surprised if Bourelly's extremely relatable song surfaces on Atlanta during its second season, which is currently scheduled to air in 2018, partly due to Glover's upcoming gig as young Lando Calrissian).

I'm live-tweeting Empire Records next Wednesday at noon

I've always wanted to either live-tweet or RiffTrax director Allan Moyle's 1995 film about record store clerks who attempt to save their store from the clutches of a strict, Blockbuster Music-like chain. Empire Records constantly airs on cable and has become a cult favorite, but in 1995, the movie was overshadowed by its hit soundtrack album (I remember borrowing the Empire Records cassette tape from a university friend because I dug "A Girl Like You" by Edwyn Collins and "Liar" by Donald Glover's favorite band), and it was barely released by Warner Bros., which must have been dissatisfied with the final cut. At times, the movie appears to have been edited together with glue and Popsicle sticks, so it's not hard to see why the studio quietly dumped it into theaters.

But what I don't understand is the cult status of this movie, which stars Anthony LaPaglia, Liv Tyler and a pre-Jerry Maguire Renee Zellweger. Empire Records is neither an offbeat but genuinely good flick that was buried and poorly received during its initial release like The Big Lebowski (or Office Space) nor a so-ineptly-made-it's-entertaining curio like Dolemite. It's just bland studio product that at its worst, takes the most overwrought parts of John Hughes' writing in The Breakfast Club and amps them up to 11.

So either join me on Twitter next Wednesday, April 14, in the afternoon as I snark on the extended "Remix! Special Fan Edition" of Empire Records (the DVD doesn't have a commentary track, so this live-tweet would be like the commentrak the DVD should have had), or check out the live-tweet recap I'll post on this blog afterward.

Community, "Introduction to Statistics": I don't know what a Mexican Halloween is, but I bet it's lewder than an Alabama Hot Pocket

I would have raved about Community's Halloween episode on Twitter or here on Blogspot on the night it aired, but I wasn't able to post about it until now because I was computerless all last week (thanks, creaky old PC--which stands for Piece o' Chit--for dying on me the week before and causing me to look like yet another Filipino who's late for everything, like this Halloween ep). "Introduction to Statistics" is so terrific it'll be staying in my DVR for a while. It's the funniest of the four Halloween eps NBC aired last Thursday night, as well as my favorite Community ep so far, thanks to elements ranging from Danny Pudi's side-splitting impression of Christian Bale's Batman to a B-plot about Shirley's divorce that allowed Yvette Nicole Brown to shine both comedically and dramatically.

In fact, everyone in the ensemble--including "Star-Burns"--got a chance to shine during "Statistics," which was written by Jon Pollack and Tim Hobert. I especially liked seeing Ken Jeong dial it down a bit as Señor Chang in this ep (shouting at the top of his lungs at his students every week was getting old). Did Donald Glover's Troy get his Delirious-era Eddie Murphy costume (complete with fake mic) from the same shop where J.D. and Turk copped their Eddie Murphy: Raw jumpsuits during Hobert's earlier series Scrubs? Gillian Jacobs looks so tiny inside the dowdy squirrel costume that Britta amusingly wears as a statement against slutty costumes (during the Community pilot, I was surprised to learn she's petite--I thought she was 5-foot-10 when I first saw her appear as a stripper in the TV spots for Choke). Too bad frequent guest star John Oliver was missing from the proceedings because I would have liked to have seen him somehow work in his Daily Show impression of a Long Island Guido.

The biggest surprise about "Statistics" was that it was directed by Justin Lin, whose indie work (Better Luck Tomorrow, Finishing the Game) I find way more interesting than his Fast and the Furious sequels, which I've never bothered to watch. One thing I've dug about Community as a single-camera comedy is that it has eschewed the mockumentary format of The Office and Parks and Recreation and opted for a more cinematic approach, particularly in sweeping crane shots of the Greendale Community College campus that would have made Johnny LaRue cream his pants. Because of Lin's involvement, "Statistics" is the most cinematic ep of the series so far. The strapping-a-camera-to-an-actor's-chest-to-simulate-a-bender trick during the Chevy Chase "tripping balls" sequence is reminiscent of Better Luck (I know, it's a camera trick that's been around since Mean Streets). And just when I thought I had my fill of Dark Knight parodies, "Statistics" pulled me back in. The director perfectly aped cinematographer Wally Pfister's camera angles from the film (I don't know who writes Community's original score music, but whoever does it nailed the essence of Hans Zimmer's Batman theme). Lin is a great addition to the series, so I was jazzed to find out from his You Offend Me You Offend My Family blog that he's slated to direct another Community ep. I'm always up for seeing more Asian Americans direct comedy so that Jay Chandrasekhar isn't all by his lonesome.