‘Atlanta’ Season 3 Premiere (SXSW 2022) Non-Spoiler Review – “Three Slaps” & “Sinterklaas Is Coming To Town”

While production on Donald Glover’s FX surreal comedy-drama series, Atlanta, Seasons 3 and 4 was delayed in September 2020 and was supposedly scheduled to begin in April 2021, the show returns to the small screen after a nearly 4-year hiatus.

The Season 3 premiere episode is titled, “Three Slaps”. It is written by Stephen Glover and directed by Hiro Murai. Meanwhile, the second episode is titled, “Sinterklaas Is Coming To Town”. It is written by co-executive producer, Janine Nabers, and directed by Murai.

In this review, I will be discussing Atlanta Season 3 Episodes 1 and 2. There will be no spoilers here, as the title of this article suggests. Nonetheless, please read ahead at your own discretion to avoid any possible revelations.

Also, since this is an MA-rated television series, I must place a trigger warning for the premiere episodes’ elements of racism and Blackface.

Plot Synopses

According to FX Networks, here is the logline for Part I of the Atlanta Season 3 premiere — “Three Slaps”.

Wow it’s been a minute. I mean, I like this episode about the troubled kid but we waited 50 years for this?

FX Networks

Here is the logline for Part II of the Atlanta Season 3 premiere — “Sinterklaas Is Coming To Town”.

I think everybody knows blackface ain’t cool anymore, we get it. They be trying too hard to go viral.

FX Networks

Discussion

The Season 3 finale of FX’s Atlanta is worth the wait. While it is the cinematographers who grab our attention, I find that the music is what is really driving us forward. For instance, the first episode ends with a repeating uncanny line via song: “Yes, it’s time to go”. It is almost as if to say that the reverie is ending, that a certain part of us must die sooner or later in order to be born again in some form or another.

These two episodes are longer than a majority of the show’s previous ones, each more or less as long as the Season 2 episode, “Teddy Perkins”. For a total of over an hour and ten minutes, Glover and his team provide fans a taste of the level-up it has undergone. Allow me to begin with Season 3 Episode 2 — “Sinterklaas Is Coming To Town” because the premiere episode, “Three Slaps”, has so many layers to it that I would prefer to save that for last.

Wake Up

“Sinterklaas Is Coming To Town” explains the time gap between the Season 2 finale — “Crabs in a Barrel” and the Season 3 premiere. Moreover, it explains why the female lead, Van Keefer (Beetz), joins the main men of the series in Europe. As you may recall, it was just Earn Marks (Glover), Alfred Miles (Henry), and Darius Epps (Stanfield) boarding a flight to Europe. Meanwhile, Van stayed behind in Atlanta, Georgia to watch over her and Earn’s daughter. In “Sinterklaas…”, it is much different as it shows us the aftermath of Paper Boi going on his European tour.

The episode highlights cultural practices, much like in the fourth Season 2 episode, “Helen”. As the title implies, it critiques the seasonal Dutch figures, Sinterklaas (Santa Klaus) and Zwarte Pete (Black Pete). While the intent is objectively argued to be innocuous, aesthetically speaking, the use of Blackface appears to be rather disturbing. What is worse is that this occurs almost everywhere our characters go, thus serving as an impediment or obstacle from them reaching their specific goals of success. It is very much like Atlanta to tackle these certain themes and issues, so it is not surprising. Nonetheless, it is still revolting to see. As one character states, “Same ratchet ass hoes, different ass city”.

Meanwhile, we see some characters witness a ceremony involving a dying man, and by the end, you might be left questioning your own beliefs. I initially picked up a Midsommar vibe from this subplot, but it turns out to be an entirely different kind of ritual being performed here. This episode has some interesting throwbacks and parallels to two Season 1 episodes — the pilot (“The Big Bang”) and Episode 5 (“Nobody Beats the Biebs”) — and I believe it is clever how the writers return to these points.

Anxiety Alert

Speaking of circling back, the premiere episode has so much going on that I do not know where to begin.

All good things come in threes, right? The Atlanta Season 3 premiere episode, “Three Slaps”, drops the viewer into reality, and interestingly enough, it takes us a while to make the proper adjustments. This episode tackles racism from the angles of gentrification and colonization; even the smallest things in life can be taken over and controlled by the white community. It poses the argument that whiteness (or being “white”, for example, a non-white person taking part in a white culture — including liking Donald Glover — such as in Rick Famuyiwa’s 2015 coming-of-age comedy-drama, Dope) is about as much a curse as Blackness.

Episode 301 has a long, chilling, yet worthwhile monologue about this idea. One character tells another that “[e]veryone is screaming at you to turn the machine off, but you can’t hear them”. As I have said once before, our society is itself one large machine, composed of smaller machines (e.g. families and communities) and us the cogs within each. According to Bernard Stiegler’s essay, “For a Neganthropology of Automatic Society”, in the critical text, Machine, we have become proletarianized by our subsistence, existence, and even consistence. “Three Slaps” elaborates that our digital era has turned us into zombie-like beings. Stiegler states:

The fact that [we] have been transformed into a crowd puts [us] in possession of a sort of collective mind which makes [us] feel, think, and act in a manner quite different from that in which each individual of [us] would feel, think, and act were [they] in a state of isolation.

Bernard Stiegler in “For a Neganthropology of Automatic Society” via ‘Machine’

Meta-Fiction, Perhaps?

The episode does not stop here. In such a subtle manner, “Three Slaps” shows us a little breakdown of its own narrative by presenting us with the basics of storytelling. (Maybe we have NBC’s Community to thank for how this is depicted?) The first act of the premiere episode sets up how the rest of itself is to be played out. It starts by telling us where we are currently in the socio-political realm of the United States. So much has been banned or restricted in our institutions that we are limited to what the government is offering on the table as if to say we do not have many choices.

The episode then establishes the roles of characters, i.e. who the good guys and bad guys are, such as painting the typical police officer out to be a fair man, when in fact, you must pay close attention to their actions made and words spoken. The plot structure leads us to the climax. Although, I will not go further in this matter so as to not spoil the entire episode.

The Spiral

Lastly, the writers’ room aims for the spiral, that everything that once was will return, albeit this time in a different shape or form. (For those who have read my reviews on HBO Max’s Raised by Wolves and Warner Brothers’ The Batman, I apologize, but just continue to hear me out.) As Anne Dufourmantelle suggests in her critical text, In Praise of Risk, the spiral is defined as “the movement that seems best to describe our relation[ship] to the past and, even more, to trauma”.

In “Three Slaps”, this could explain why a specific character refuses to return to a certain place. They do not want to discover themselves at the endpoint, and in doing so, they choose not to be a part of the metaphor that places them in a sort of liminal space. As Dufourmantelle states, “Metaphor is a violent act. Violent because it’s irreversible”. Maybe this is a good thing, that those who choose to throw themselves into the deep end are not the same people who were destroyed before.

The Crew of the Atlanta Season 3 Premiere

“Three Slaps”

Donald Glover, Paul Simms, Dianne McGunigle, Stephen Glover, Hiro Murai, and Stefani Robinson serve as the executive producers of the series. Janine Nabers serves as the co-executive producer, while Kathryn Dean and Kaitlin Waldron serve as the producers. Ibra Ake, Taofik Kolade, Jamal Olori, and Francesca Sloane serve as the supervising producers. Jordan Temple serves as the co-producer.

Alexa L. Fogel stars as the casting director, while Tara Feldstein Bennett and Chase Paris serve as the Atlanta casting directors. Kathryn Zamora-Benson serves as the casting associate.

Christian Sprenger serves as the director of photography. Kyle Reiter and Isaac Hagy are the editors of the episode. Jen Bryson and Cameron Ross serve as the assistant editors.

Jen Malone and Fam Udeorji serve as the music supervisors, with Whitney A. Pilzer as the associate music producer. David Wingo scores the premiere episode.

Timothy O’Brien is the production designer, while Tiffany Hasbourne serves as the costume designer. Denise Tunnell serves as the head of the make-up department, while Shornell Young serves as the head of the hair department.

“Sinterklaas Is Coming To Town”.

In Episode 302, Alex Orr and Cass Marks join Waldron as the producers. In the Amsterdam unit, Jelani Isaacs and Sander Verdonk serve as producers.

Kate Rhodes James is the casting director for the U.K. and France, while Rebecca van Unen joins her as the casting directors for the Netherlands. Francesca Bradley serves as the casting associate. Zamora-Benson is the U.S. casting associate.

Stephen Murphy serves as the cinematographer, while Hagy serves as the editor. Bryson and Ross return as the assistant editors.

Malone and Udeorji return as the music supervisors, with Pilzer as the associate music producer.

Jonathan Paul Green serves as the production designer of the episode. Lynda Armstrong serves as the head of the make-up department, while Shunika Terry is the head of the hair department. Celia Yau serves as the costume designer. Sophie Coombes is the set decorator.

Faisa Sontodimedjo does make-up and hair for the Amsterdam unit, while Amy Miller is the casting associate for the Netherlands.

The Cast of Atlanta

Donald Glover stars as Earnest “Earn” Marks.

Brian Tyree Henry, LaKeith Stanfield, and Zazie Beetz are credited as their characters, Alfred “Paper Boi” Miles, Darius Epps, and Vanessa “Van” Keefer in the first episode, respectively. They make their physical on-screen Season 3 debut in the following episode.

“Three Slaps”

In the Atlanta Season 3 premiere, Jamie Neumann (HBO’s Lovecraft Country) and Laura Dreyfuss star as a white wife-and-wife couple. Christopher Farrar portrays a child named “Larry”, while Tobias Segal portrays an unnamed white man.

Tyrell Munn appears as a Black man credited as “Black”, while Jillian Batherson plays Mrs. Conner, Larry’s Language Arts teacher. Nicole Lockley and Timothy Tinker Sr. play Larry’s mother and grandfather, respectively. Princess Elmore appears as Principal Miller, while Lauren Halpern plays Larry’s counselor, Mrs. Grier. Jenne Kang appears as an Asian social worker for the Family and Children Services.

Sean Jay, Kaleel Harrison, and Madison Keaton star as Lanre, Yves, and Fatima, Larry’s foster siblings. Ilana Kohanchi plays a customer at the farmer’s market, while Sean Hankinson plays a man in glasses. Marc Levasseur portrays a police officer, while Canecia Gordon plays a Black social worker.

“Sinterklaas Is Coming To Town”

Matteo Simoni portrays Dirk, a man in the Netherlands who organizes a show for Paper Boi. Anniek Pheifer plays Feena, a woman who takes Darius and Van on a journey. Elisa van Riessen plays a Death Doula of a dying man.

Rachel Coutinho and Amalie Gissel play Ida and Hedy, two Dutch women who spent a night with Paper Boi in his hotel room, respectively. Ruben van der Meer plays Earn and Paper Boi’s driver in the Netherlands.

Myrthe Boersma and Tim Oliver Somer appear as female and male security officers at a Swiss airport, respectively. Arthur Veen plays Ambroos, Earn’s taxi driver, while Jonathan Huisman plays a Dutch cop.

Jon Tracy appears as a bell boy at Paper Boi’s hotel, while Philip van Ees plays a Dutch man.

Performances and Character Developments

Neumann and Dreyfuss make an intimidating yet somewhat lovely couple. They deviate from the norm of heterosexual duos in American Gothic/ horror narratives. The two actors do well at portraying themselves as racist white women who believe they have got it all figured out. Farrar is an excellent contrast to them, playing the Black character who is full of youth and wonder. Think of Roald Dahl’s The Witches but in the style of Atlanta. While they are not whom we usually see in Atlanta, they do hold some impact as the writers’ attempt to anthologize the series. (We have learned from Stranger Things Season 2 that it does not help if the overarching story has already been etched in stone. Still, I laud the writers’ efforts.)

Glover’s Earn shows himself to have slightly improved as Paper Boi’s manager. This could be because no one is there to get in his way. The character knows what he desires professionally, which is stability for himself and his family. Furthermore, fulfilling this need gives him a purpose in life.

Beetz’s Van asserts her value as a woman, a Black individual, and a human being in this two-part premiere. Now that she has that, she can learn to search for her purpose in life. I could argue that it is only because we do not see much of her in Season 2.

Henry’s Alfred has developed the most. In Atlanta Season 1, we see him starting out in the rap game and trying to make money off his music. In the following season, “Robbin’ Season”, Paper Boi is trying to make ends meet as his success as an artist grows and evolves. However, in this current season, we see that he has gotten ahead of himself and possesses hubris. I could be wrong, but with what we see so far, there will be tests on his character now that the fame has gone to his head.

Final Thoughts on the Atlanta Season 3 Premiere

“Three Slaps” and “Sinterklaas Is Coming To Town” both prove an excellent way to commence this third season of Atlanta. I find the first episode to be a blend of Peele’s Get Out and Craven’s The People Under the Stairs, but with more of das Unheimliche of what we have seen before with the horrendous treatments of members of the Black community. If you thought “Teddy Perkins” was creepy, “Three Slaps” further demonstrates the writers’ combined ability to outdo themselves. The second episode holds an aura of discomfort that extrapolates from the previous, giving an unbroken and prolonged narrative that traps us in a state of uneasiness.

Overall, Atlanta has entered a new era, unlike anything we’ve seen before. We have a long way to go until the series reaches its conclusion, but until then, we must savor the journey. With the exception of the first episode, Season 3 will transpire primarily in Europe, meaning the series will literally cover more ground in that area. These first two episodes seem to implicate that Atlanta will find its roots in Atlantis or the Atlantic Ocean, sticking true to its name.

Donald Glover’s Atlanta Season 3 premieres on March 24th on FX and will also stream via Hulu the next day!

Have you seen Glover’s series? If so, then what are your thoughts on it so far? Let us know! For more comedy and drama-related news and reviews visit and follow The Cinema Spot on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram!

Also, if you admire Brian Tyree Henry’s work, you might need to add this Funko POP of his character, Phastos, from Marvel Studios’ Eternals to your vinyl figure collection. Click on our Amazon affiliate link here!