What I’m Watching: Atlanta

Atlanta: Season 2, Episode 3 “Money Bag Shawty” (B+)

Watching this episode, I realized that, in some ways, Earn is a lot like Larry David’s character on “Curb Your Enthusiasm.” Like always finds way to get back at him, though Earn hardly asks for it since he doesn’t push buttons and challenge undisputed tropes the way that Larry does. He did push a bit more than usual in this hour when he felt like he needed to celebrate his newfound prosperity in a way that hardly seemed offensive or objectionable. Getting thrown out of the club for paying with a bill that even the security guard knew wasn’t fake was an unfortunate start to his night on the town, and watching a white man with a gun successfully use that same bill when he had been refused trying to do it moments earlier got him going. The exaggeration of reality that this show employed in this episode was more effective than it often is, featured most heavily in Earn’s visit to the strip club, where he had to pay a twenty percent exchange fee to turn his hundreds into ones, needed to pay for the alcohol that definitely was not included in the table as it was supposed to be, and getting charged twenty dollars for a three-second lapdance that took place a few feet from Van. Earn also got a whole lot of angry passion from the waiter who approached Paper Boi at the bar, but he missed out on the troubling antics in the recording studio that found Paper Boi and Darius leaving just before that engineer suffered an unfortunate fate.