Review: ‘Atlanta’ and the Surreal Larceny of Life

One mark of great television, which “Atlanta” manifested out of the box its first season in 2016, is that you have no idea where any episode will go until you get there.

Donald Glover’s comedy about life on the margins of the Atlanta hip-hop scene could detour at any moment. It was a richly detailed story about relationships and money and black life that also gave us a black rapper named Justin Bieber, a full-length faux-cable-news debate show (with fake commercials) and a scene of people being run over by an invisible car.

In “Atlanta Robbin’ Season,” which begins Thursday on FX, the mystery begins with the title. Is this simply Season 2 of “Atlanta”? Is it an entirely new series?

It is the same. And it is different. And that’s a wonderful, surreal, hilarious thing.

“Atlanta” has not become “CSI: Atlanta.” It continues the story of Earn (Glover), the manager to his cousin Alfred (Brian Tyree Henry), who raps under the name Paper Boi. But first it drops us off with another set of characters, in a vignette about a peculiar crime — not exactly comedy, not exactly crime drama, but a kind of absurdist hybrid.

That introduces us to “robbin’ season,” a term defined by Alfred’s deadpan stoner-philosopher roommate, Darius (Lakeith Stanfield): the time just before Christmas, when presents need to be bought and “everybody’s got to eat.”

But where does robbin’ season stop and regular life begin? Especially for the struggling creatives in “Atlanta” (Alfred’s hit single won him more fame than cash), it can be hard to tell.

Each of the first three episodes either involves or mentions robbery, sometimes scary, sometimes ludicrous, as with the armed man who sticks up an old friend out of nowhere, apologizing profusely throughout it: “Hey, my fault, bro.”

But there are also scams and hustles and the everyday pickpocketing of dignity. When Earn goes out with Van (Zazie Beetz), his friend, his sometime lover and the mother of his child, the movie theater refuses to accept a $100 bill from him but takes one from the middle-aged white man behind him in line.

This focus puts a finer point on what was an intermittent theme in the first season: the larcenous nature of everyday life. Money in “Atlanta” is like an occult force, flowing through everything but accessible only through arcane arts and invocations.

You can feel its presence in the loftlike office of a streaming music company that Earn and Alfred visit. After a disappointing meeting — the audio system glitches trying to play Alfred’s music — they wander around and see another artist inside a conference room, performing for rapt staffers. Success seems so close, but it’s behind impenetrable, soundproof glass.

The season also introduces Clark County (RJ Walker), a more successful rapper whose manager — a white guy — has connections to secure the rich advertising deals that elude Alfred. (Though he’s laid-back offstage, he’s been typecast into a bad-boy role by the industry; the only endorsement he’s offered is for “cocaine white cheddar” snack chips.)

When the characters in “Atlanta” do get money, it’s like a silent alarm goes off somewhere; the entire world becomes focused on separating the newfound cash from its holder. A windfall attracts new temporary friends; nightclubs transform into hungry money-extraction vortices.

Along with its new title, “Atlanta Robbin’ Season” has a different, more serial structure from the impressionistic first season. What’s blessedly the same: the dry sense of humor, the luscious visual style established by the frequent director Hiro Murai and the writers’ effortless fluency with social media’s language and quirks. (A brilliant early bit involves the popularity of white-girl acoustic covers of rap songs on YouTube.)

The storytelling in “Atlanta” is dreamlike, which is another way of saying that it’s unusually realistic. As in life, weird or comical developments don’t announce themselves before they happen: They just start happening, and your consciousness has to catch up. The off-balance feeling this creates is the buzz of watching “Atlanta.”

That buzz kicks in during the first episode, where Earn finds himself moderating a dispute at the house of his uncle Willy (a crackling guest spot by the comedian Katt Williams). Willy casually mentions he has an alligator in the bathroom. You don’t see an alligator, just a closed door. Is he kidding? Maybe. But now you are in a world where an alligator might be in the next room.

This is what “Atlanta” is so good at: dropping you into scenes blind, trusting that getting oriented will be half the pleasure.

The approach requires close attention, and the episodes reward a second watching. But they’re hardly homework. Glover and his creative team (including his brother, Stephen) are in enough control of their material to produce meticulously crafted episodes that play like offhanded shaggy-dog (or -alligator) stories. “Robbin’ Season” is so good, it’s almost criminal.