Atlanta

Donald Glover's FX series, four seasons, 2016 to 2022, all on Hulu. Earn (Glover) is a broke Princeton dropout trying to manage his cousin Alfred, aka Paper Boi (Brian Tyree Henry), a rapper whose first single is starting to catch. Darius (LaKeith Stanfield) is Alfred's roommate and philosophical weather system. Van (Zazie Beetz) is Earn's on-and-off partner and the mother of his kid. The pilot establishes the shape of the thing — a guy with no money, a cousin with a little buzz, a city that will not cut any of them a break — and then the show spends the next four seasons wandering off into whatever it feels like.

Hiro Murai directs most of the run, and the look of this show does more lifting than most prestige dramas get out of a whole writers' room — long takes, patient framing, a willingness to sit in a weird room and let it stay weird. Henry is the find of the decade; Paper Boi talks like someone who's genuinely tired and that exhaustion carries whole episodes. Stanfield plays Darius as if he's receiving a signal nobody else in the frame can hear, and it's funnier the longer you watch him do it. Glover's writing team — his brother Stephen Glover does a lot of the heavy lifting — treats half-hour television like a short-film anthology hiding inside a sitcom. Any given episode might be a hangout, a horror story, a documentary parody, a straight character piece. The one you've heard about, with the piano, is real. There are others.

It is not consistent and does not try to be. Episodes that go all the way out on a limb land next to episodes that feel like warmups. The main plot — Earn and Alfred's careers — barely moves for stretches, and if you need forward momentum you'll be checking your phone. Season three spends a lot of its runtime in Europe and on standalone stories with none of the main cast, which some people loved and some people treated as a betrayal. Van gets short-changed for long patches before the show remembers Beetz is one of its best weapons.

If you liked Louie, early Donald Glover music, Barry's weirder detours, or any show where a half hour might just be two guys in a car — you're home. If you want plot machinery, cliffhangers, or anything resembling a season arc, you'll quit after episode three thinking nothing happened. It rewards patience and a tolerance for tone whiplash.

WORTH IT is the floor for this show, honestly. Murai's direction is as good as anything on TV in the back half of the 2010s, Henry and Stanfield are giving performances that don't exist anywhere else, and the writing trusts the audience to sit with discomfort without a character showing up to explain the discomfort. It has plenty to say about race, class, and the music industry grinding people down, and it says all of it through character and situation rather than monologue. Nobody turns to camera. The themes land because the storytelling earns them. The unevenness is the price of the ambition, and it's a fair trade.