The Best Episodes Of Atlanta, Ranked

After four seasons, FX's landmark series "Atlanta" has come to an end. The Emmy-winning surrealist comedy was created by Donald Glover, who, in addition to writing and directing duties, stars as Earnest "Earn" Marks, a young man who returns home to Atlanta after abruptly dropping out of Princeton University. Earn is strapped for cash, but finds work managing the career of his cousin Alfred Miles (Brian Tyree Henry), a rising local rap artist who goes by "Paper Boi" and is tagged around by his philosophizing pal Darius (Lakeith Stanfield). 

Earn juggles his managerial duties with an on-again, off-again relationship with his girlfriend Van Vanessa "Van" Kiefer (Zazie Beetz) and his co-parenting responsibilities for his daughter Lottie (Mia Atehortua).

Over the course of the 41 mind-bending, beguiling, and often challenging episodes, "Atlanta" boldly experiments with tone and structure while cementing its legacy as one of the best television series of all time. The show thoroughly exploded the conception of what a comedy series could look like and achieve in 30 minutes. It will be sorely missed. Pretty much every episode is good — the lowest IMDb rating of the series is a still-impressive 7.3 — but several are truly outstanding. Here are the series' 12 best episodes, ranked.

"New Jazz" starts innocently, finding Earn, Al, and Darius in a casual Amsterdam cafe, still on Al's European tour. Earn treats Al and Darius to a reprieve with passes to a bougie spa after stressful, demoralizing travails in "Cancer Attack" and "White Fashion." En route to the spa, Al and Darius take a detour at a coffee shop to procure THC-laced space cakes.

Once Al and Darius lose each other deep in Amsterdam's infamous Red Light District, the episode spirals deep into surreality. We stick with Al as he evades a pack of brute young men who recognize him on the street and seeks shelter in the middle of what turns out to be an art performance at a gallery. He strikes up a flirtatious, if abrasive, conversation with theater-goer Lorraine (Ava Grey), who chastises him for not knowing who owns the rights to his masters, the original sound recordings of his music library. When Lorraine takes Al to "Canceled Club," he is shocked to find Liam Neeson (playing himself) at the bar. The two share a conversation in which Neeson doubles down on the real-life racist remarks he made in a 2019 interview with The Independent. At heart, "New Jazz" is an indictment of Al's complicated, frequently laissez-faire relationship with his fame. The morning after, his hallucinatory journey proves quite sobering.

While the fourth season of "Atlanta" may not be as subversive as the third season with its anthology episodes, it still feels impossible to predict what kind of show you are going to get. The one consistency in the fourth season, however, is that, with each passing episode, Earn reveals his vulnerability. This is largely thanks to the breakthroughs he experiences in therapy in the season's earlier episode "The Homeliest Little Horse."

In "Snipe Hunt," Earn pulls out all the stops for his camping trip with Lottie and Van, renting an entire campground with a 12-person tent. "Snipe Hunt" unfolds like an indie movie with a delicate tone and unhurried pace that feels more interested in character than plot. While hiking and exploring nature with Lottie, Van and Earn dance around the big question on their minds and those of viewers as "Atlanta" inches closer to its series finale: Will Van and Lottie move to Los Angeles with Earn? Things finally come to a head when Earn wakes up in the middle of the night unable to get warm in the supersized 12-person tent. He gets physically and emotionally close to Van, gauging where she is at with the idea of moving. He levels with her, saying that he wants them to be a family together in Los Angeles. Van is initially reticent, convinced that Earn is more in love with the idea of her as Lottie's mother than her herself, but Earn proves he loves Van for being Van. For the first time in four seasons, "Snipe Hunt" finds Earn and Van decidedly on the same page and on the same path moving forward.

After four seasons of surreal, mind-bending stories, the most infamous remains season two's "Teddy Perkins." We find Darius procuring goods from a supply store in rural Georgia that also sells hats with Confederate flags and "Southern Made" sewn onto them. He buys one and scribbles out the hat's text, leaving it saying "u Mad," then hops in his rented U-Haul truck and heads off. When he arrives at a secluded, ornate estate, he is greeted by the eerie, high-pitch-voiced Theodore "Teddy" Perkins (played by Glover in prosthetic makeup). Darius explains he's there to retrieve a piano he saw was listed for free on an anonymous message board. The tension is made increasingly nerve-wracking by Teddy's odd behavior — from eating an enormous soft-boiled ostrich egg with his hands to forcing Darius to hang around as he shows him the museum he is building within the estate.

When Darius is finally left alone with the piano, Darius tries to make a run for it and escape with the instrument on the elevator. But the elevator is sent to the basement floor, where he encounters Teddy's brother Benny, who warns Darius to retrieve his gun before Teddy kills them both. Darius is delayed once more when Teddy purposefully blocks his U-Haul truck and holds him at gunpoint.

"Teddy Perkins" unfolds like a slow-burn horror film, culminating in a violent climax that displays the toll of artistic genius and fame with plenty of allusions to Michael Jackson's persona later in life

On the surface, "Barbershop" begins as one of the more straightforward episodes of "Atlanta," finding Alfred just wanting to get his haircut before an upcoming magazine shoot. His hilariously absent-minded barber Bibby (Robert S. Powell), on the other hand, seems dead-set on making this simple task as arduous as possible. Bibby starts on a confusing note as he sets to work on Alfred's hair while chatting on his Bluetooth earpiece, leaving Alfred perpetually unsure as to whom he is talking to. The confusion escalates when Bibby receives an urgent call from his girlfriend, who needs his immediate assistance. He convinces Alfred to tag along. It turns out Bibby was supposed to cut her girlfriend's son's hair, forcing Alfred to wait even longer.

Bibby tries to make it up to Alfred by treating him to a meal, but instead takes him to eat leftovers at a home under construction. He ropes Alfred into helping him steal lumber from the construction site, where he is confronted by the owner. Things just get crazier as Bibby catches his son skipping school, leading to a hit-and-run car accident, and, finally Alfred's hair. "Barbershop" feels like a sketch you never want to end and it keeps managing to find trap doors to fall. It is a great showcase for Brian Tyree Henry's deadpan humor as he is forced to endure Bibby's madcap journey of a day that feels cosmically and comically designed to prevent him from getting his haircut.

One of the chief complaints lodged against "Atlanta" throughout Season 3 was the lack of Van. She drifted in and out of the season, surfacing only in "Sinterklaas Is Coming to Town," "White Fashion," and "The Old Man and the Tree." It was difficult to track Van's emotional mindset, as each appearance found her at sea, letting herself go in an almost Zen-like detachment to absorb the experience while sightseeing and partying in Amsterdam. Regardless, we knew something was up with Van's mental health. Season 3's gonzo finale "Tarrare" is a resounding confirmation of ours our suspicions: Van is not doing so well.

We first find Van on the street when she's recognized by her old friend Candice (Adriyan Rae), who is in town with her pals Shanice (Shanice Castro) and Xosha (Xosha Roquemore). In the time since she parted ways with Earn and the guys, Van stayed in Paris, adopting a French accent and a new career as a fashion model. Candice senses something is amiss with Van, who deflects by taking the girls on a turbulent trip around town. From a sexually charged encounter with Alexander Skarsgård (playing himself) to a violent confrontation in an art gallery involving a stale baguette used as a weapon and a fine dining experience with human hands on the menu, "Tarrare" is "Atlanta" at its most unhinged. The episode reaches its heartbreaking crescendo when Van has a nervous breakdown, realizing she, like the show itself, needs to go home to Atlanta.

"Woods" is effectively an attack on Alfred's image and identity, beginning with a dream in which his late mother visits his home and chastises him for how messy he keeps the place. Alfred gets picked up by Sierra (Angela Wildflower), a former exotic dancer who has ascended into a locally famous social media influencer via her wig company. Sierra encourages Alfred to level up his image by taking him shopping at a bougie men's clothing boutique and to a pedicure appointment at a salon. It becomes clear that Sierra is interested in grooming Alfred to appear a certain way to appear as her boyfriend on social media. Alfred hits his breaking point with Sierra when he catches her taking a picture of them together to post online and storms out of the salon.

Things take a turn on Alfred's walk home when he runs into a group of teenagers who attack and rob him. Alfred is able to defend himself until one of the teenagers starts shooting at him, forcing him to flee into the woods to hide. In the woods, he meets an aggressive, disturbed man named Wiley (Reggie Green) who taunts and stalks him, calling him "deer guts" as he struggles to find his way out. When he finally does, he breaks down sobbing in a gas station parking lot. It is the rawest and most vulnerable we have seen Alfred and undoubtedly the darkest, headiest, and best episode of "Atlanta."