Image via FX
There was no way Atlanta’s writers would let the final season pass without giving viewers the bizarreness that attracted them to the series in the first place. The hit FX show is well into Season 4, and it’s been just as peculiar as you’d expect. Episode 5 titled “Work Ethic!” features a powerful TV producer named Kirkwood Chocolate (presumably portrayed by Donald Glover who also directed the episode), a one-off character similar to Season 2’s Teddy Perkins.
The entertainment mogul has created an empire and built a giant movie studio in Atlanta—similar to Tyler Perry’s movie studio in Georgia—where he produces movies and television geared toward a Black audience. While he has many fans, others, like Vanessa “Van” Keefer (Zazie Beetz), find his work to be stereotypical and derogatory for creating exaggerated portrayals of Black people. Mr. Chocolate represents real-life producers and executives in show business who have dedicated their careers to making content for a Black audience that not all Black people see themselves in. The reality is that he also represents non-Black executives in Hollywood who believe that including stereotypes within their shows or movies somehow makes the stories more marketable.
The episode’s writer, Janine Nabers, says that although Mr. Chocolate feels familiar and similar to someone like Perry, the character is an “amalgamation” of different Hollywood people. “There’s an aesthetic when it comes to Black folk and art that I think some people really double down on. I think Mr. Chocolate is not just one person,” Nabers, who also wrote the Van-centered “Sinterklaas Is Coming to Town” episode in Season 3, tells Complex. “He represents many different people in Hollywood that kind of have this similar aesthetic of Blackness and art and the stories that we tell and what resonates with being a compelling Black story or a real Black story.”
Season 3 ended with Van questioning who she is apart from Earn (Glover) and whether she is a good mother to their daughter, Lottie (Austin Elle Fisher). After the last few episodes focused on the rest of the characters like Paper Boi (Brian Tyree Henry) and Earn, the spotlight is now back on Van. “Work Ethic!” starts with Van taking on an acting role in a TV show created by Mr. Chocolate in an effort to become more autonomous and do something that would make Lottie proud.
Image via FX
Throughout the episode, Van’s demeanor comes off as someone who feels superior to the stories Mr. Chocolate sells. His employees at the studio seem to venerate him for his contributions to their lives and to the Black community as a whole, but when she interacts with them, Van still talks down on his work and what it represents. She seems to consider it all lowbrow, and even pokes fun at his work receiving recognition by the BET Awards and the NAACP, referring to them as “Black awards.” While this was Van’s moment to shine, she quickly gets eclipsed by her daughter. The mysterious Mr. Chocolate (who is an omnipresent God-like figure who oversees the sets through cameras and communicates with everyone via a speaker system) takes a liking to Lottie.
Lottie then becomes the star of multiple shows and Van loses control as the child is taken from set to set, (the sound stages are named after stars like the late John Witherspoon and Tommy “Tiny” Lister Jr.) acting in various scenes throughout the day. The filmmaker and the team are churning out content, and not making anything of value, and Van and Lottie get swept up in the process. While Van wants out, Lottie seems to be enjoying the experience and wants to continue working with Mr. Chocolate, who promises the child a lifetime of financial success.
The episode is a commentary on the concept of Black art, and what makes it “good” or “bad.” Although people like Earn and Van might not enjoy the content Mr. Chocolate creates, there are millions of people who do. It still doesn’t ever feel like the episode’s intention is to poke fun at or ridicule but more so to examine people like Mr. Chocolate and his intentions, giving a full scope of what this kind of person represents to everyone. The filmmaker is exploitative to an extent and has amassed his wealth by feeding into stereotypes, but in many ways, he is also providing opportunities for thousands of people who may have been overlooked in life and in Hollywood and giving them a solid starting point.
The characters in Atlanta are rarely ever clearly labeled as good or bad, and that’s really the beauty of the show. Like the rest of us, they are simply flawed human beings with strengths and weaknesses, who have their own motivations and reasoning for being who they are. If you’ve been paying attention to Season 4 so far, the writers are seemingly tying up all the loose ends as the series slowly comes to an end. Season 4’s episodes have already set the stage for where the main characters are going to end up in the finale.
Nabers says that Season 4 so far has been a vessel to answer lingering questions fans have had about the characters since Season 1. Like in this season’s episode “The Homeliest Little Horse,” Earn finally revealed why he dropped out of Princeton, and that gave viewers insight into how he ended up becoming the man he is. “We’ve done this really cool thing with Season 4, where we really give these characters the ending that I think they deserve,” Nabers says. “A lot of them are confronting these kinds of questions about themselves in these episodes that are questions that we’ve been asking about them for so long, too.”
Nabers hopped on a call with Complex to speak on Van’s journey in Episode 5, Lottie finding her voice, Atlanta’s exploration of what is considered “good” Black art, and more. The final season of Atlanta is currently airing on FX on Thursdays at 10 p.m. ET.
This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.
How have you been feeling about Atlanta coming to an end?
I joined Atlanta as a fan. I came in for Seasons 3 and 4, so the fact that I was given this opportunity at all was really awesome. But I think we really became a family. We’re all super close and I just think that we’ve done this really cool thing with Season 4, where we really give these characters the ending that I think they deserve.
I think a lot of them are confronting these kinds of questions about themselves in the episodes that are questions that we’ve been asking about them for so long, too. In this particular episode with Van, we really do explore that as well. So I’m really proud of Season 4. I think we stuck the landing.
Why was it important to focus on Van for this episode?
Well, it really has become more of a Lottie episode, and I think at the end of the day, initially, it was very much a Van episode. This episode was written almost three years ago before COVID and before the world shut down. When the shutdown happened, we kind of went back and reexamined this idea of just motherhood and Lottie and the future, what we want or hope for our children. Looking at someone like Van and her particular taste as a Black woman and how that kind of butts heads with Lottie’s taste as a Black girl in this world today and in this Atlanta that is very much now Hollywood adjacent. And so that was a really fun thing to explore.
And I think that Lottie has a really kind of beautiful arc in this season too, with her parents and just the person that they’ve shaped. Donald is a dad, I’m a mother. And I think at the end of the day we really just kind of honed in on parenthood and just how to shape that through the lens of something like the Chocolate lens.
In this episode, we get to see that Van has grown into motherhood in a way and feels more comfortable in that mode. Have you been able to see her progress as a mother throughout the show?
Yeah, I definitely think that’s what her story is this season. And I think the sacrifices that one makes for their kid at the end of the day when they realize that they might not be the person they thought that they were going to be, I don’t think that Van had thought that she would have a child so young and be where she is today.
But at some point, you realize that your child becomes a fully functioning person who has their own thought and their own taste, and do you stand in the way of that, or do you let them form their own opinion even though you don’t agree with that opinion? That’s what this episode examines in a way, but it’s just jokes. It’s also funny. But yeah, at the heart of this episode, that’s what it’s about.
Image via FX
There are references throughout the [episode] about Tyler Perry and his work. Are you interested in seeing people’s reactions and them making those comparisons with this character you’ve created?
Yeah, I would say that this character is an amalgamation of different Hollywood people. Before I came to work on Atlanta, I was working with a very big Hollywood person and this person said to me when I pitched a show about a Black family, they said, “Well, where’s the abuse? Why aren’t women being beaten? And where are the people doing drugs?”
So there’s this aesthetic when it comes to Black folk and art that I think some people really double down on. Mr. Chocolate, it’s not just one person. He represents many different people in Hollywood that kind of have this similar aesthetic of Blackness and art and the stories that we tell and what resonates with being a compelling Black story or a real Black story.
I think a lot of people look at Van and a lot of people think that she’s biracial; she’s just a light-skinned Black woman. And that’s something that has been kind of a running joke in the show. But also when you look at Van you question her allegiance to Blackness. And I think that this episode kind of explores that a little bit as well.
Can you confirm that Mr. Chocolate is Donald or that Donald is playing Mr. Chocolate?
I cannot confirm who Mr. Chocolate is. I have no idea who Mr. Chocolate is. [Laughs.]
It felt very much like Teddy Perkins!
I don’t know!
In that final scene, we hear Mr. Chocolate tell Van she’s a single mother who can’t feed her kid, who has an ex-convict love interest, and a gun-toting grandma. The kind of stereotypes that everybody criticizes Tyler Perry’s movies for, the things that she frowns upon, are very much her life. So is there also a message that yes, this might not be your type of art, but it doesn’t mean that it’s less than, just because you don’t relate to it?
Exactly, exactly. At the end of the day, there is this idea that you’re rooting for people who are Black, but what if the art is bad? But again, art is subjective. So for Van, she sees Mr. Chocolate’s work as being totally horrible, but Mr. Chocolate at the end of the day is running a fucking business and he’s employing all of these Black people, he’s giving them jobs, he’s giving them opportunity, he’s taking people off the street, he’s taking people off of billboards, that’s what we’re seeing.
We’re seeing this man who’s literally saying, “If you have a dream, I can make your dream come true.” Yeah, are these shows that Van would watch on a Tuesday with her girlfriends? No, but there are millions of people who do, millions of Black people who do and who appreciate it and lean into it. So there is this idea of this kind of war with Blackness and art and Van is our way into that.
I think it’s also a way to say that just because one person is in charge or they’re making all these things, it doesn’t mean that they speak for or represent everybody.
Exactly. Sometimes the people that help and sometimes the people that really elevate Black culture also kind of hurt it a little bit because it leans into a stereotype that then makes people think, “Well, this is what we have to watch.” It becomes a formula that we’re now used to seeing.
So when you see Black people with nuance on-screen, people are so stunned by it. I mean, look at what Atlanta was for so many people. And I think in our final season, that is something that I think we really wanted to put on-screen, in a way. Because even then, I can go to a party and say, “Oh, I write on Atlanta,” and people always think that I’m talking about Black-ish. They’re like, “Oh, I love Black-ish.” They get these shows confused all the time. I’ll say “Atlanta” and they’re like, “Oh, she wrote on Insecure.”
Wow. And they couldn’t be more different.
Exactly. So I think at the end of the day you have all of these aesthetics and you have all of these kinds of, the taste of this and what is Blackness and what are the ways into Black storytelling. And then you go to a party in Hollywood and it’s all the same to some people. So there’s also the comedy of that, as well.
As a writer on the show, do you ever concern yourself with non-Black viewers and how they can perceive certain things or do you not care to make it understandable for them?
Honestly, we write shit that makes us laugh and makes us want to watch this show. I mean, that was the one thing I learned when I came into the room for Atlanta, was that a lot of it was just watching—for the first two months—we were just watching really funny YouTube videos and just laughing our asses off and talking about the stuff that’s not meant to be seen as art or entertainment that people make or people just happen to be in these really funny situations. And it’s recorded and it’s the best scene that you can’t write that, you know, can’t make that shit up because it’s just real life and it’s hilarious.
For us, it’s not really about white people, it’s really about Black people, because we’re Black, and what makes us laugh, what makes us think about these characters, what makes us feel proud about telling the story of who these people are. And that at the end of the day is what both Seasons 3 and 4 were to us.
Atlanta has historically had episodes throughout the seasons that are focused on one particular character at a time. Why do you think that has been a thing that they have continued to do throughout the seasons? I don’t think a lot of other shows have done this before.
Yeah, well I think, look, you take a formula show with four people, something like Sex and the City, and that’s a half-hour show and it’s an ensemble and their stories bounce off of each other and then they all have these mini-arcs in the episode. And you could tell a story like that. But I think what Atlanta has reshaped the landscape with is telling a story, these kinds of siloed stories, and allowing people to have their own experiences outside of the other people on the show. Because yeah, you have Earn and Al and they’ve shaped each other and they kind of are a yin and yang in a lot of ways, but also Earn is a dad and Al is someone who’s making music, but also he doesn’t have the same kind of life thing that Earn is trying to figure out.
What’s great about these siloed episodes is that you can have some stand on their own as these individual characters and having their own kind of alien or outside experiences in a city that’s so familiar to them. But also that, to me, is what makes this show so unique is that these people, as much as they are kind of a family and they’re very much a group, they are very much individual characters with their own experiences. For Van, it’s really exciting to just see her outside of Earn. She’s been so tangled up with him in so many ways and I think this is really a nice kind of step out to just see her as a mom in her own kind of life without her being in the background.
This episode is also very much focused on Lottie, and we get to know her more than we have throughout the whole series. We see her having her own thoughts and opinions and she voices what she wants. What does that represent for you to have us see her where she is now?
She’s a great blend of the two of them. At the end of the day, I think a lot of people question why are these two people still in each other’s lives? And it’s because of Lottie, that is the tether. And I think this show wouldn’t do its job well if we didn’t make Lottie a full character by the end of this because it’s been so many years and they really did raise this human together. And so allowing her to have her own view on the world is really exciting. And so we just leaned into that.
Can you tell us a little bit about what you hope people get from the “Work Ethic!” episode?
I would hope that they get from this episode that at the end of the day there are tons of Black stuff that people make, a lot of Black people make a lot of art that we see. And it’s OK to not like it. It’s OK to not be a fan of someone’s work if you are Black and they are Black because that only helps them get better as artists. We don’t have to hold each other’s hands so much in terms of being a supportive entity as much as you can.
Criticism is something that people need in order to get better. It helps them get better. And so that to me is kind of what I would say my takeaway for this episode is. That we can be a little bit more honest with each other about what’s good and what’s not and how we feel about this and what we feel about that and not take it so personally if someone is not a fan of the product that you put out.