‘Atlanta FX’ Returns Thursday And We Can’t Wait

The second season of “Atlanta FX” will premiere at 10 .m. Thursday, March 1, 2018, bringing Donald Glover, Lakeith Stanfield and Bryan Tyree Henry back to the small screen for an encore.

Also back are Earnest (Earn) Marks and Vanessa (Van) Keifer, who have a child together on the show but are one of those couples that aren’t together but continue to see each other.

“At FX, they didn’t get Earn and Van at all,” Glover told The New Yorker. “I said, ‘This is every one of my aunts—you have a kid with a guy, he’s around, you’re still attracted to him.’ Poor people can’t afford to go to therapy.”

The show promises to have the same fierceness, the same pop as the first season.

Glover, who as auteur of “Atlanta FX” is simultaneously recording another album as Childish Gambino and shooting a new “Star Wars” movie, feels that his TV show should be funny, but for the right reasons.

“I don’t even want them laughing if they’re laughing at the caged animal in the zoo,” he told the New Yorker. “I want them to really experience racism, to really feel what it’s like to be black in America. People come to ‘Atlanta’ for the strip clubs and the music and the cool talking, but the eat-your-vegetables part is that the characters aren’t smoking weed all the time because it’s cool but because they have P.T.S.D.—every black person does. It’s scary to be at the bottom, yelling up out of the hole, and all they shout down is ‘Keep digging! We’ll reach God soon!’ ”

Such insight is why we can’t wait for Thursday night on the FX channel.

T. Johnson: