Why Does ‘Atlanta’ Keep Disappearing Its Main Cast?

So far, Atlanta has had three standalone episodes this season excluding the main cast. This number sounds small (it’s still about 50 percent of what we’ve seen at this point). But on a show that boasts some of the best, most fascinating young actors working today—Brian Tyree Henry, LaKeith Stanfield, Zazie Beetz, and Donald Glover—three entire episodes devoid of their chemistry and magnetism is, frankly, one too many.

Which brings us to “Trini 2 De Bone,” tonight’s heavy-handed examination of wealthy white people and the immigrants and/or Black people they hire to raise their children. I think more than any other episode this season, this one highlights the identity crisis Atlanta is currently experiencing regarding who its audience is and who the writers are crafting stories for. Listen, I get it. A lot has happened in the four years since the show last aired that would alter the direction and energy of any show. I also wouldn’t be surprised if Robbin’ Season walking away with zero Emmys in 2018 made Glover overthink some things.

Despite all the ideas and complexity you can extrapolate from a single episode of Atlanta, the reasons I and the Black people I’ve talked to like the show are very simple. The jokes are funny. The characters feel like people you know or have met before. (Bring back Tracy!) The performances are stellar (you desperately want to hug Paper Boi). And the show has also felt—forgive me for using this phrase—unapologetically Black, in that Glover and the writers don’t need to explain in-house cultural references or jokes to the show’s white audience members.

That being said, the simple premise of Earn, Al, Darius and Van having dumb adventures in Europe and encountering weirdos is way more interesting than whatever obvious racial commentary and fables about whiteness the writers seem insistent on telling this season—one of which I enjoyed and thought was well-conceived. But I’m firmly good on just one.

But let’s actually get into the episode written by Jordan Temple and directed by Glover. We start out with a white man named Miles (Justin Hagan) returning to his New York penthouse to find his son Sebastian (Indy Sullivan Groudis), who he stares at like an intruder, and wife Braunwyn (Christina Bennett Lind) there. Suddenly, he gets a call that a woman named Sylvia, who we find out is Sebastian’s Trinidadian nanny, passed away. The main running bit throughout the episode is that Sebastian has spent so much time with Sylvia that he’s absorbed all this knowledge of her culture, from food to language to music. Later on, at her funeral, we meet a white man with a fake Caribbean accent who says that he was also raised by Sylvia. Even before we get to the upsetting Chet Hanks cameo, the joke is already stale.

Likewise, the episode centers around the family attending Sylvia’s funeral in a Trinidadian neighborhood. (I am notably not from New York and will not guess where). Braunwyn has conflicted feelings on allowing Sebastian to see a dead person at such a young age, which we can assume is just masking her fear of having to go to a foreign, predominantly Black space. Miles, just as dubiously, wants to use Sylvia’s funeral as an opportunity for Sebastian to confront human death for the first time. Throughout the episode, he also keeps receiving a piece of Sylvia’s mail at his door that he tries and fails to return to the sender.

When the family pulls up to the funeral at a storefront church, Miles and Braunwyn are just as visibly uncomfortable as you would expect. But Sebastian feels at home, exchanging sayings with Sylvia’s daughter Khadija (Khadija Speer) when she greets them. If you’ve attended any sort of Black homegoing or church service, a lively and jubilant environment is not unusual. But the rowdiness of the service obviously confounds Miles and Braunwyn. On the other hand, Sebastian, who’s clearly been brought to this church by Sylvia regularly, is joining in on the call-and-response. Oh yeah, and Chet Hanks is there. (We don’t need to talk about it).

Things escalate when Sylvia’s other daughter Princess (Alia Raquel) grabs the microphone during a dance performance to “Trini 2 De Bone”—which Sebastian knows by heart—and tells the congregation that her mother was never there for her and her siblings because she was always taking care of white people’s children. Her brother interjects that their mother was providing for them. This eventually escalates into a big melee, and Miles, Braunwyn and Sebastian promptly leave.

Back at home, Miles and Braunwyn try to digest what they just witnessed, like every white person reacting to a slap at the Oscars. Braunwyn’s also worried that her and Miles weren’t present enough in Sebastian’s upbringing, but Miles assures her and, by extension, himself, that they were.

In the episode’s final sobering moment, all of Miles’' insistence that he and his wife have been a crucial part of his son’s life are undone when he receives Sylvia’s mysterious package outside his door once again. He finally opens it to find family photos of Sebastian and Sylvia that seemingly don’t exist of their biological family.

As a Black viewer, I’m not sure what I was supposed to feel during this episode or take away from its overarching lesson that I don’t already know. Even if you don’t personally understand what it’s like to have all of your labor taken for granted by white people, we all saw The Help in 2011. And this episode doesn’t do a better job of centering a Black, female domestic worker’s humanity than that movie.

Instead, this episode inadvertently reduces Sylvia to a series of functions because we understand who she is primarily through a white gaze. Miles and Braunwyn only come to realize Sylvia’s value toward the end of the episode because it exposes what they lack as parents. They still don’t know or care about who she is as a person. Aside from a brief eulogy, the script doesn’t supply her with much interiority or even a sense of defiance, as she occupies these underappreciated and often abused roles in the lives of white people. The fact that Sylvia is merely a teachable moment in Miles and Braunwyn’s lives is not really subverted or challenged.

But that would be an entirely different episode with a different approach. According to the description, “Trini 2 De Bone” was at least partially written with white viewers in mind. Hopefully, the next five episodes are less concerned about upsetting white people like it’s a litmus test for good Black television. I simply want to hang with my boys and Van, particularly in situations where they’re not just props for exposing the nature of white folks.