Drama
Doctor Who
The good Doctor’s been flitting around time, space and the BBC since 1963. Now he’s also a fixture in the US, toting his curiously British brand of sci-fi in his highly mobile TARDIS. Just how safe is this contraption?
Earn Marks was supposed to go to Princeton and make something of himself. But that didn’t really happen.
After he dropped out of college in the first year, Earn found himself living in Atlanta with the mother of his child, Vanessa, and trying to figure out what he was going to do with his life and pay his bills. He was no good at selling airline miles, so he decided to go for the big bucks: managing his rising, rap artist cousin, Alfred, a.k.a. Paper Boi.
But managing rap artists is a competitive, ever-changing profession. And though Earn was and is up for the challenge, he never really knew just how much you have to struggle to make it big.
Welcome to the streets of Atlanta. Here, plenty of people are competing to make it in the rap industry. And you have to be good, and know all the right people, to succeed. Along the way, you’ll struggle, learn about yourself, about culture and racism and about how money makes the world go ‘round.
The MA-rated series, although it features a rapper named Paper Boi, is really about Paper Boi’s cousin, Earn. It’s about how he’s determined to make a better life for himself and his young daughter, Lottie, and how he’ll go to great lengths to prove that he’s not the loser his family believes him to be. And although Earn is the focus, his drama is tied into Paper Boi’s story of growing up in Atlanta’s hood, along with Paper’s Boi’s friend and always-high sidekick, Darius.
The first and second season show Earn, Paper Boi and Darius making their way through Atlanta’s music industry. But now, in the third season, the focus is on Paper Boi and his management team as they tour through Europe, deal with racism, casual sex, prison sentences and drug use.
It’s sort of like they never left the streets. And that reality is woven into every fabric of this show.
Although Atlanta focuses on music and real-life artist Childish Gambino (whose real name is Donald Glover and who plays Earn in the series), it also highlights the struggles of poverty, the brokenness of the foster care system, the realities of racism and the struggles of parenthood and love. It’s a difficult show to define, but highlighting the problematic issues is a piece of cake.
First, a sense of hopelessness hangs over many of the episodes which usually takes any “comedy” and turns it straight to a drama about the harsh realities of life. Then of course there’s a lot of profane, some graphic violence, sex scenes and sexual content including nudity at a strip club, as well as casual and approved drug use.
There are plenty of “real” moments here that I’m sure many people can relate to, especially if they’ve grown up in poverty or have tried to make their way in a difficult industry. But that doesn’t make all of the glaring, graphic issues any more palatable.
Earn follows Paper Boi to Europe on his European tour, but he has to clean up a mess when he arrives.
While on tour, Paper Boi chooses not to perform at a venue in Europe because everyone’s faces are painted black. He believes that this is “blackface,” but it’s actually a Christmas tradition in the town.
A man gets in bed, shirtless, with two women who are in t-shirts and underwear. They’re evidently preparing for a threesome when the women get into a fistfight and destroy an entire hotel. Earn gets out of bed and urinates, shirtless, and we see him from the waist up. It’s clear that Earn and this woman had sex the night before and he wakes up, unable to find his underwear or belt. When he gets to the airport, he has to drop his pants while being patted down and the entire crowd sees him exposed. Darius tells Vanessa that his “balls were crushed as a child” and that he now cannot procreate.
A music manager repetitively kicks and punches an innocent man. A man lies in bed, near death, with a death doula present to help his friends accept his impending passing. After a few people say their goodbyes, a plastic cover is placed over his face and it suffocates him (we watch the entire scene and it’s quite graphic).
Darius tells Vanessa that he is “high” and that “the weed is good ” in Amsterdam. He also says that because of the content of the weed that the city, to him, is “like Jesus.”
The f-word is used 10 times and the s-word is heard three times. The n-word is used often. Other profanities include multiple utterances each of “b–ch,” “h-ll,” “a–” and “son of a b–ch.”
Kristin Smith joined the Plugged In team in 2017. Formerly a Spanish and English teacher, Kristin loves reading literature and eating authentic Mexican tacos. She and her husband, Eddy, love raising their children Judah and Selah. Kristin also has a deep affection for coffee, music, her dog (Cali) and cat (Aslan).
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