Television series

Atlanta

Name: Atlanta
Genre: Drama, Comedy, Music
Released: 2016
Cast: Donald Glover, Brian Tyree Henry, LaKeith Stanfield, Zazie Beetz

Atlanta follows two cousins chasing a breakout rap career, but it refuses to behave like a hustle story — episodes veer into ghost stories, invisible cars and minstrel-show satire without ever losing the ache underneath. It's funny the way real conversation is funny, then suddenly it isn't. Best for viewers who want comedy strange, unresolved and quietly devastating rather than tidy.

TVMaze rating

6.9

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Insecure2016

Issa Rae's series shares Atlanta's warmth toward flawed, funny, striving Black adults navigating money, friendship and image without ever moralizing about their choices.

But More grounded and rom-com-adjacent — don't expect any of Atlanta's detours into the uncanny.

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A hitman trying to become an actor, told with the same unpredictable rhythm — a scene can turn from deadpan joke to real violence inside a single cut.

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The wildcard

Something you would not have found on your own.

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Same creative circle, same appetite for using surrealism to say what naturalism can't about race and image — Atlanta's strangest episodes are this show's entire language.

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High Maintenance2016

Loosely connected vignettes about New Yorkers seen through a weed delivery guy — plotless, generous, occasionally strange, always more interested in a person than a punchline.

But Lower stakes throughout; if you loved Atlanta's tension and dread, this is much gentler company.

DAVE2020no page yet

A half-mockumentary about a white rapper's ridiculous rise, mining the industry's absurdity and ego for comedy while still taking the music itself seriously.

But Broader and more sitcom-shaped, with less of Atlanta's melancholy undertow.

Master of None2015

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But Talkier and less visually inventive overall, aside from a few standout formal swings.

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An anthology that treats genre — crime, folklore, dark comedy — as interchangeable costumes for the same moral rot, with similar tonal whiplash.

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Ramy2019

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Watermelon Man1970no page yet

It's the ancestor of Atlanta's trick: smuggling a real argument about race inside a joke so strange you can't look away, tonal audacity used as protest.

A bigoted white insurance salesman wakes up Black overnight in this Melvin Van Peebles satire — an absurd premise played with total sincerity, decades before Atlanta made that combination its signature.

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Same trick of using comedy as camouflage for despair about chasing success in an industry built to eat you — just drawn instead of shot.

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