AtlantA's ending was bittersweet, as is any good Series Finale: you're happy to see it end but you're gonna miss it. Thankfully, with SWARM on Amazon Prime, it's like AtlantA never left...or, no, it's like AtlantA died but it was buried in the pet sematary and came back different. Swarm is screamingly funny, disturbing, surreal, intense, and challenging. Think of it like a cross between ZOLA and Stephen King's MISERY (with trace elements of Get Out and Fargo). With a great lead performance, killer photography and editing, it's the first thing this year to really fucking excite me. Seriously, Dominique Fishback gives one Hell of a shapeshifting, evolving performance over 7 episodes.
Janine Nabors, co-creator of Swarm,
"I don't like putting in any kind of 'message,' I prefer creating feelings, feelings that stick with you and have you, later on, asking yourself 'Why do I feel this way? why can't I stop thinking about this show? I don't think I've ever seen anything like this on TV' and having to sit with that and think about it."
Season 3 of Atlanta opens with a white lesbian couple who enslave, parade, abuse, and attempt to murder their black foster children - based on a true story where a lesbian couple actually, tragically, killed their black foster children and themselves (The Hart Family). Now, it's not lost on me that gay couples have a hard time adopting because of social stigmas, bigotry, etc. But to ignore the story of The Hart Family Murders/Suicides would be erasure of that story's victims and the malicious roots of its racial politics. To be clear: it never shows them, doing it _because_ they're gay, nor implies anything of the sort. Them being lesbians is incidental.
The Devonte Hart stand-in [whose name is Loquareeous but is renamed/gentrified as 'Larry'] is sent to live with this couple because his [black] Mom scares the [white] guidance counselor at school. Now, she doesn't do anything violent, she's just harsh and kinda loud. It almost feels like the show is daring its white audience to find fault with her parenting even as it juxtaposes her with the soft-spoken, giggly, 'woke,' organic, kombucha-loving granola white ladies as the actual abusers. Thankfully, unlike the real tragedy of the Hart Family, the children survive and Loquareeous goes back to where he should be: with his Mom. It's a queasy but necessary juxtaposition that dismantles both the Angry Black Woman stereotype and the idea of pure, innocent white ladies. There is the middle-ground compromise of humanizing all three women...
...but Donald Glover scorches the earth of middle-ground for one of AtlantA's--and television's--best episodes. It's an episode that feels 'dangerous,' risky, which makes it exciting, like you'll be cancelled for enjoying it (and he would go on to do it again in episode 4, The Big Payback, where a seemingly obnoxious black woman [provocatively named Shaniqua Johnson] harasses a white dude for almost the entire episode about reparations).
Along with co-creator Janine Nabors, Glover continues that risk-taking in SWARM. It's about a Beyonce stan whose obsessive fandom turns to serial killing after her only IRL friend commits suicide. Usually, in True Crime, women of color (especially sex workers) are known as the 'Less-Dead' because police usually don't notice nor care about them, which is why serial killers and/or kidnappers target them: they're easy prey and low priority (they would actually write D.N.I. on their bodybags, which stands for Do Not Investigate). As the show puts it, "they fall through the cracks."
Swarm asks and answers their own question, "What if you turned that inside-out?" by giving black women their Pearl (no, we're not gonna include Octavia Spencer in MA, a stupid movie written and directed by a white dude who was way out of his element). Just as black female victims fall through the cracks, so would a black female serial killer - police never suspect it's a black woman which is one of the show's best running jokes (with a superb payoff).
I think the spirit of this show stems from black creators and audiences being sick of the tip-toeing - of black characters being boxed in because white showrunners are afraid of their shows (and themselves) being capital-C Cancelled. It's cowardly, for sure, but, digging in, it comes from a fear of portraying black people in the wrong light. There's the dangerous stereotype that black people are violent and
untrustworthy, usually juxtaposed with white people as being more
virtuous, good-natured, and passive - which is especially true for Black
Women who are, more often than not, portrayed as madwomen; crazy,
irrational, angry. The 'balance' to that is to portray black women as pure, goddess-like, without fault, sometimes outright magical or as a plot device to uplift a white heroine. Either way, it sucks. Swarm doesn't do any of that. In fact, the show is partially about the harmful effects of deifying human beings.
Our anti-heroine, 'Dre, is everything white liberal writers try to avoid: wild-eyed and insane, picking people off while screeching and laughing hysterically. Hell, if I'd seen a clip from Swarm without context, it'd probably ruffle my white guilt and I'd rush online to tell you all not to watch it with some overwritten didactic piece. But this is a 7-episode character study so we're given incredible nuance along with the brutality and insanity. Not to mention, like, white ladies have had plenty of violent, challenging characters in the past decade (sometimes with some insultingly sassy black sidekick) so black women are more than due for a character like 'Dre, especially on a platform as huge as Amazon Prime.
Just like with Walter White, Tony Soprano, Don Draper, etc. we're not even meant to like or root for 'Dre. She's just a compelling character to watch and there's never a moment where we get some traumatic sob story to help white people 'enjoy' her actions. She isn't ornamental, she doesn't sparkle with Black Girl Magic for white women to adorn their tumblrs with. She's disgusting, intense, weird, devoid of charisma and impossible to get comfortable with - I haven't seen a role like this for a black actress since Lupita N'yongo's creepy-as-fuck turn as Red in Jordan Peele's US.
Our anti-heroine, 'Dre, is everything white liberal writers try to avoid: wild-eyed and insane, picking people off while screeching and laughing hysterically. Hell, if I'd seen a clip from Swarm without context, it'd probably ruffle my white guilt and I'd rush online to tell you all not to watch it with some overwritten didactic piece. But this is a 7-episode character study so we're given incredible nuance along with the brutality and insanity. Not to mention, like, white ladies have had plenty of violent, challenging characters in the past decade (sometimes with some insultingly sassy black sidekick) so black women are more than due for a character like 'Dre, especially on a platform as huge as Amazon Prime.
Just like with Walter White, Tony Soprano, Don Draper, etc. we're not even meant to like or root for 'Dre. She's just a compelling character to watch and there's never a moment where we get some traumatic sob story to help white people 'enjoy' her actions. She isn't ornamental, she doesn't sparkle with Black Girl Magic for white women to adorn their tumblrs with. She's disgusting, intense, weird, devoid of charisma and impossible to get comfortable with - I haven't seen a role like this for a black actress since Lupita N'yongo's creepy-as-fuck turn as Red in Jordan Peele's US.
There's a great scene late in the season where a social worker tells a [white] True Crime documentary crew that there is no easy explanation for why 'Dre is the way she is. There's nothing convenient to cling to to make her sympathetic.
She's fucked up and you're just gonna have to live with that.
