I might have met Donald Glover my freshman year of college. He was a senior when I was first there, but we were in a department with less than 300 students total, so while I don't actually remember if I specifically met him, it's possible. There, that's my celebrity brag, such as it is, as well as noting my jealousy for the success of a fellow Tisch alum (likewise, Rachel Bloom, though she was in a different department.)
I became aware of him as the celebrity he has become when I got into Community. While the entire cast of the show was fantastic (even Chevy Chase was mostly good, despite the sense I get that he hated being there) Glover's Troy Barnes was probably my favorite, with his combination of childlike naivete, absurd logical leaps, and underlying optimism and heart. Glover's comic timing was also on-point.
As Community was dying a slow death following the year Dan Harmon was (actually pretty appropriately) fired, Glover quit the show to pursue other projects, and he became something of a superstar - the guy got to be Lando Calrissien and nailed it, even if Solo itself was kind of the epitome of a well-made but ultimately pointless prequel. Then, there's his music, including the song currently stuck in my head, Redbone.
Glover's next TV project after Community was Atlanta, a show that defies definition. While I might be four years late, I've finally finished the first season, which... again, it's hard to really describe.
Ostensibly, it's about Earn, an Ivy-League dropout who has come home to Atlanta and struggles to provide for his daughter Lottie and ex-girlfriend Van. After his cousin Alfred starts to make it big as a rapper, Earn nudges his way into being Alfred's ("Paper Boi's") manager. The fourth regular cast member is Darius, Alfred's stoner roommate who might actually be some kind of mystical prophet.
The show changes format and tone frequently - one early episode focuses on Van and her dinner with an old friend that has them discussing the uncomfortable intersection of money, romance, gender relations, and race, while another has Darius convince Earn to invest a ton of his money in some very bizarre series of trades that won't pay off for months (I'm given to understand that this comes back in the second season) that feels a lot like that quest chain in Ocarina of Time you need to go through to get the Biggoron's Sword, or another episode that ends with a shooting at a club and a shot of club-goers getting hit with a literally invisible car.
The show is a half-hour comedy... sort of? But there's a stream-of-consciousness element to it that again, defies definition. One episode is a Charlie-Rose-like talk show on some sort of alternate-universe BET, complete with fake commercials (my favorite being one in which a guy buys an Arizona Ice T at a convenience store and gets charged 1.49, only for both the customer and the cashier to express shared confusion, given that it literally says 99 cents on the can).
There are times when the show feels like a character-based, grounded story about what it's like to be black in America, and other times when it feels like an episode of Welcome to Night Vale.
When talking about it before its premiere, Glover described the show as Twin Peaks about rappers. I don't know that the show creates the same sort of unified setting-as-character, but it's possible that instead, it's just taking the entire country or world as its surreal land of weirdos that don't make sense.
There's another season for me to watch, and I'm curious/scared to see the infamous Teddy Perkins episode. But the show is one of those pieces that sits with you, and forces you to figure out what exactly it is that you're watching, which I tend to like.
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