Donald Glover’s Atlanta is often regarded as one of the best television shows of the 2010s — but we’d say it’s one of the best of all time (by a wide margin). Glover broke out in entertainment as a writer on 30 Rock and eventually starred in another hit comedy, NBC’s Community, but to create, star in, and occasionally direct Atlanta, he channeled his expertise in not just television but the world of hip-hop, too. 

Glover, a native of Stone Mountain, Georgia — just outside of Atlanta proper — is, of course, also the popular rapper and musician Childish Gambino. Like the show, Gambino’s discography can be silly, heady, and surreal. On its surface, Atlanta is a dramedy about the world of an Ivy League dropout as he manages his former-drug-dealer cousin’s rap career, an on-again-off-again courtship with the mother of his young child, and life in a Black mecca with weird shit around every corner. At its core, it’s a story about being at once at the margins and in the center of different worlds. It debuted in 2016 amongst a renaissance in Black television that included Issa Rae’s Insecure, Ava DuVernay’s Queen Sugar, and The People v. O. J. Simpson: American Crime Story, and Underground, helmed by executive producer Anthony Hemingway. —Mankaprr Conteh