Best TV: Atlanta, Bulletproof, Pangolins and Britain's Royal Weddings

You have one phone call: Earn (Donald Glover, aka Childish Gambino) in a jail waiting room
BBC/FX Networks
Alastair McKay15 May 2018

It was fortunate for the BBC that Donald Glover, aka Childish Gambino, chose last week to release his video This Is America, just as his multi-award winning sitcom was about to make its debut on terrestrial television in the UK.

That video is an extraordinary thing, a beautiful dance, a sermon and a provocation, and its visual style (courtesy of Glover’s frequent collaborator, director Hiro Murai), achieved a reach well beyond the music’s usual orbit.

Atlanta (BBC iPlayer / Sundays, 10pm, BBC Two) is different, and it’s possible to get tied up trying to explain why.

Partly this is because Glover is not overly interested in explaining himself, which is probably as it should be.

Atlanta: The series is currently airing on BBC Two
BBC/FX Networks

Mostly it’s because the show doesn’t stay the same from episode to episode. What starts out as a low-energy comedy about Earn (Glover), a college drop-out managing the rap career of his cousin, Alfred (Brian Tyree Henry) — who records as Paper Boi — zigzags smartly into something else.

The original premise, the show that Glover sold to the US network FX, was about Earn and Al trying to make it in the music industry, and Al getting famous for shooting somebody. The third of the three amigos, Darius (Lakeith Stanfield), is the funny one. A typical Darius aside is: “If you could use a rat as a phone, that’d be genius.” Stoner stuff. There is music.

Certainly, it’s not your average rap drama. The New Yorker calls it “the black comedy about black life”. It is that too.

Glover hired an all-black writing team, some with no TV experience, to guarantee the authenticity of the milieu, which unfolds in the shadows of the unglamorous margins of the city. Such authenticity extends to the frequent use of the N-word. Nothing is lost in translation, because nothing is translated.

Atlanta doesn’t do many of the things you’d expect of a comedy. In fact, calling it a comedy feels a bit of misnomer, because the wit is restrained to the point of near-invisibility, though at times you can catch sprinklings of Glover’s stand-up routines, as in the scene in episode three, where Earn is refused a kids’ meal in a burger joint, and struggles to comprehend the logic. “A kid can’t get an adult meal?”

What else is Atlanta? Original, mostly, and absurd, because Glover’s rules of engagement are about breaking the rules. But there are pointers. It’s mostly fanciful to call it “the black Seinfeld”, because Seinfeld stretched the comedy elastic while glorying in the playful nastiness of Jerry and George.

Atlanta exists on a hazier plane, and its freshness comes from its acceptance of the foibles of its characters. They’re flawed, and human, and trapped. They don’t even complain very much when things go wrong.

After the unfortunate shooting incident, much of episode two takes place inside a jail waiting room. Earn, as ever, is the dispassionate observer, and the other inmates are amused and a little bored by the antics of a mentally ill prisoner who takes his cup and drinks water from the toilet before spitting it over a cop. It’s what happens next that makes Atlanta different. It’s not a punchline, but it is violent.

There’s a scene at the start of Season Two which sums it up, when Earn visits his uncle, who claims to have an alligator in the back room. In Atlanta, you must always expect the alligator.

@AHMcKay

Pick of the day

Bulletproof - Sky One, 9pm

As the director of the film remake of The Sweeney, and football hooligan films The Football Factory and The Firm, Nick Love has a reputation for hard-edged action.

His new cop show builds on the energy of The Sweeney, though the focus of the drama isn’t so much the car chases and the gung-ho police action as the bromance between the two cops Pike (Ashley Walters) and Bishop (Noel Clarke). Pike’s the family man, Bishop is the walking timebomb.

Banter: Ashley Walters and Noel Clarke
Sky

Clarke Peters stars as Pike’s dad, Ronald Pike Snr, a decorated cop who is frustrated that his boy isn’t making more effort to climb the career ladder. Lindsey Coulson is Lead Officer Sarah Tanner, who looks after the team.

In episode one, a criminal gang is stealing cars, there’s a stakeout at a warehouse, a kidnap, a car chase down the docks, and a rush to A&E.

Walters and Clarke have fun, starting out with locker room banter at the boxing gym, before moving on to a discussion of free-range meat.

But then the widescreen action begins, five minutes in to the show, with the pursuit of a red Audi into the docklands.

Screen time

Pangolins — The World’s Most Wanted Animal - BBC Two, 8pm

David Attenborough narrates this extraordinary documentary about an endangered animal many of us will not have heard of before. Pangolins are, says Attenborough, “the world’s only truly scaly mammal”. They are shy, secretive animals, sometimes known as scaly anteaters, with claws which can dig through concrete, and tongues as long as their bodies.

Their scales are the source of the problem, as they are used in traditional Asian medicine, and they have the unwanted distinction of being the world’s most trafficked wild mammals. The film follows conservationist Maria Diekmann who travels from her base in Namibia to Vietnam, Thailand and China, where the problem is at its worst.

BBC Two: A pangolin
BBC/Maria Diekmann

Britain’s Royal Weddings - London Live, 8pm

If any of the 2,640 “commoners” attending the royal wedding haven’t already picked up picnic supplies, there’ll be a bigger scrum in the nibbles aisle at the Windsor M&S than for a picture of the newly married non-commoners. There’s no al fresco grub advice in this survey of royal weddings, but it does chart how they have changed over the years.

Unlocking Sherlock - London Live, 10pm

A fifth series of Sherlock appears to be further away than Kanye West admitting that perhaps a manager might be a good business decision, as would deleting Twitter off his phone. You don’t need to be a genius of Sherlock’s magnitude to see that.

At the moment Benedict Cumberbatch is continuing an Infinity War, Martin Freeman is gearing up for the end of humanity in Netflix film Cargo, and Mark Gatiss is working on a new interpretation of Dracula, leaving little time to best Moriarty or tidy up 221B.

What this behind-the-scenes piece solves is how Gatiss and Steven Moffat reinvigorated Holmes and produced some of the most entertaining and bravura TV of the past several years.

Catch up

The Bridge - BBC iPlayer

Saga Noren is back, below, and this time she’s at the centre of a Twitter storm in which several irritable people are upset because the end of the first episode was followed by a clip from the second, which resolved the cliffhanger. Given that the person dangling over that cliff was Saga herself, a certain peevishness is excusable, but the good news — surely — is that The Bridge is as dark and compelling as ever. Long live Saga!

Hawking - BBC iPlayer

Now that Benedict Cumberbatch is tearing up the screen in Patrick Melrose, why not revisit his performance in this 2004 film written by Peter Morgan, about the late astrophysicist’s years as a PhD student at Cambridge? The film won a Bafta, and covers the period where Hawking, deep into the development of his theory of the Big Bang, is diagnosed with motor neurone disease and given two years to live.

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