“Atlanta” Season 3 has been three years in the making. Though Donald Glover and the rest of the writers room began penning the third installment in 2019, the pandemic unsurprisingly put a pause on production.
Viewers might feel that Season 3 is a little too on-the-nose to have been written three years ago — but Glover swears that the writers simply predicted the future.
“It’s so frustrating. I’m gonna try and get FX to put a disclaimer before [the episodes],” he joked during Thursday’s FX TCA panel. “It’s like we wrote all of this in 2019. A lot of this stuff is gonna seem like a parody of stuff that happened, but we actually prophesied most of the s— in 2020. The world is extremely predictable. We really just knew how a lot of this stuff was gonna pan out.”
Season 3 of “Atlanta” will take place primarily in Europe. Earn (Glover), Alfred (Brian Tyree Henry), Darius (LaKeith Stanfield) and Van (Zazie Beetz) are in the midst of a successful European tour as the group navigates their new surroundings as outsiders and struggles to adjust to the newfound success.
‘Atlanta’ to End With Season 4 on FX
Expanding upon the trajectory for the season, Glover explained: “Season 3 is kind of like our maximalists season. I think it’s us being like, ‘Yo, we’re in control but what does that mean? Why did we even get here? What is this really?’ And also just leaving Atlanta and being like, ‘OK, the world is out there and it’s not Atlanta.’ There are different rules, different places, and people go through different things. So it is like fish out of water, you know — or, well, a bigger pond.”
The upcoming season was written in tandem with Season 4, which will be the final season. While much of Season 3 remained intact, Glover explained that there were changes made to Season 4 “because I think we all changed.”
“I think we all got older and just went through our life, and I think COVID was a very reflective time,” he said. “So all of us kind of grew up. The show is very punk, I think. And I think we became more not punk, because we cared about stuff.”
FX renewed “Atlanta” for a third season in June 2018, one month after Season 2 — a.k.a. “Robbin’ Season” — ended. “Atlanta” received its Season 4 renewal in 2019.
Glover executive produces “Atlanta” with Paul Simms, Dianne McGunigle, Stephen Glover and Hiro Murai. The show hails from FX Productions.
Through its first two seasons, “Atlanta” has won five Emmy Awards as well as two Golden Globe Awards, two AFI awards, Peabody, PGA, WGA, TCA, NAACP and Critics’ Choice Awards.