How Atlanta ushered in a new era of non-traditional, non-white TV

The fall of 2016 will go down in history as the dawn of a Black TV renaissance. Queen Sugar brought an Ava DuVernay-led production that would give opportunities to dozens of first-time female directors. Insecure ushered in the prestige Black sitcom, introducing eventual mogul Issa Rae and opening the door a bit wider for other internet creators like Quinta Brunson to get their chance on primetime. Meanwhile, on FX, Donald Glover accomplished a near-indescribable feat. Though he gave us the memorable “Twin Peaks with rappers” tagline, the show took the image of the rapper in pop culture (along with several others, including the drug dealer and the broke boy) and elevated it from a common stereotype to a full, nuanced character.

None of the four beloved main characters on Atlanta, which airs its series finale on November 10, is just one thing, though they could have been minimized into singular tropes. Sardonic rapper Paper Boi (Brian Tyree Henry), his college dropout cousin/manager Earn (Donald Glover), their psychedelic friend Darius (LaKeith Stanfield), and Earn’s baby mama Van (Zazie Beetz) would likely have been diminished to tone-deaf jokes or special-episode surrogates in the previous golden age of Black TV, with shows like Living Single and Girlfriends focused on the descendants of the Talented Tenth. Instead, they’re given the same agency and nuanced eye that were turned towards families behaving badly or white male antiheroes. The characters could deal with topics like financial struggles, living with grief, and arrested development without getting shuffled into the industry death knell of “not having popular appeal.”

Atlanta would still be a great show with just its incisive social commentary and full-belly laughs, but then it took its loose “dramedy” categorization and blew it wide open, shifting between genres and formats episode to episode and even turning out stunning homages to other media. Season one’s “B.A.N.” is the episode that first showed the series’ capabilities, placing Paper Boi in a roundtable talk show complete with its own original ads. After that first dip, the show built its way up for season four’s stellar “The Goof Who Sat By The Door,” a revisionist-history mockumentary that has a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it connection to the city itself. These episodes have captivated audiences with their storytelling capabilities and helped others realize that diverse shows can accomplish anything they want (something fans of these series already knew).

Hollywood makes new moves based on previous successes. Once Atlanta won its first few Emmys, decision-makers glommed onto the truth that uncategorizable shows can be successful. Now there are several more beloved series that treat other underrepresented groups with the same nuance and care, while letting them escape the mold of sitcom, soap, and prestige-drama formats and make something entirely new.

When Reservation Dogs premiered, it was praised for a lot of traits that made Atlanta’s first season so singular, including an incredibly strong sense of self from the very first episode. From the wild opening heist, it was clear that the show’s all-Native writing team and creators Taika Waititi and Sterlin Harjo were going to upset the usual stereotypes around Indigenous people. And throughout its first two seasons, the comedy has embraced absurdism and treated the systemic issues that Bear, Elora, Willie, and Cheese face with both empathy and humor. It doesn’t fit into the formula that Hollywood previously had for Indigenous characters, which often sunk into trauma porn.

Compare the week of Atlanta’s series finale to its series premiere, and there are so many great diverse shows that are empathetic and experimental. Ramy has been lauded for centering a Muslim family in New Jersey, with each member getting their own developed storylines. And then there’s Ramy actor and comedian Mo Amer, who created a Netflix show based on his own life that showed the red tape of a Houston family’s asylum claim. Meanwhile, Hulu’s This Fool details the hilarious day-to-day of a case manager for the recently incarcerated—one of them is his own cousin—and puts a fresh spin on the common character dilemmas of life stagnancy and codependency. Even shows that exist within traditional genres—like the network sitcom Abbott Elementary, the Disney+ superhero spectacle Ms. Marvel, and sketch shows like Sherman’s Showcase and A Black Lady Sketch Show—can bring intra-community nuances to the small screen.

With the success of Atlanta, its writing team and directors have contributed to the building of a television canon that actually reflects real life. Black people and people of color often get shuffled into the prescribed roles that mainstream society has built for them. TV can be the biggest perpetrator, boxing POC characters into specific molds that lack authenticity and even a basic empathy for those marginalized people. What we see onscreen seeps into our subconscious and affects the way we see each other and ourselves. Though Glover himself would probably say he just wanted to make his Black Twin Peaks, he and the award-winning Atlanta team also made a crack in those molds, encouraging other creators to bring their authentic selves to TV. That—along with the invisible cars and “Teddy Perkins”—will be its legacy.