How Atlanta: Robbin’ Season Brilliantly Flipped the Florida Man Meme

This post contains spoilers for Season 2, Episode 1 of Atlanta.

Atlanta understands reality well enough to know when it needs to be subverted. Real life is tough; it’s painful; it’s not a place where dreams, or nightmares, hold much oxygen. The FX show—created by multi-hyphenate Donald Glover, visually guided by Hiro Murai, and written by an all-black staff—has returned for its second season with a cutting subtitle: Robbin Season’, also known as the pre-holiday season when crime spikes in the Georgia city. It’s the core of the show this year, the dose of truth that hums under the comedy and keeps it tethered to the real world. But between those doses are dreamlike striations that buoy and flex the show’s brilliant sense of humor, its sense of subversion. And no joke does that better in the Season 2 premiere than the reinvention of the Florida Man meme.

Florida Man, for the uninitiated, is a years-old meme about the bizarre crimes that seem to arise out of the Southern state, and the men who commit them. Think “Florida man steals sausages, jumps off bridge to avoid arrest”. The joke has inspired a dedicated Reddit page that dubs the collective persona as the “world’s worst superhero” and a Twitter account. In Atlanta, Earn (Glover) casually mentions to Darius (Lakeith Stanfield) that his parents are traveling to Florida.

“Just make sure you tell ‘em to watch out for Florida man,” Darius warns.

Earn bites. “What’s Florida Man?”

Darius then launches into an explanation that disregards the actual meme, recasting Florida Man as a creepy criminal: “Think of him as an alt-right Johnny Appleseed,” he explains. “That’s why headlines always say ‘Florida Man.’”

He then rattles off a list of imaginary headlines: Florida Man shoots an unarmed black teenager, steals a car to get fast food, murders a flamingo. As he narrates, the show cuts to a nightmarish montage of a trucker hat-wearing man committing these crimes. We never see his face, further lending him the amorphous quality of an urban myth. In an interview with the New Yorker, Glover explained the order of the Florida Man sequence: “It was important to me that we see him shooting an unarmed black teen first, that you get the sting of that before we see him beating a flamingo to death, which is just funny.”

So why does Florida Man do all this, according to Darius? Because he’s in “fuckin’ cahoots” with the government—he wants to keep black people from moving to Florida and registering to vote, obviously. It might be the dazed character’s best joke-cum-conspiracy theory yet, a testament to his casual proclivity for spinning radical hearsay into something approximating a secret truth. He says that crazy shit with confidence. If it weren’t for Earn serving up dubious side glances and Jim Halpert-ing us away from the conspiracies, a more gullible viewer might be pressed to open a Google tab in incognito mode to see if what Darius is saying is even a little bit true.

Atlanta burns brightly and expands within these confines, seizing and sharpening a familiar meme until it reaches an apical state. Florida Man was already a perfect Internet joke—surreal, actually funny, enticing to the morbidly curious. Atlanta turned it into a self-contained urban legend. It flows perfectly into the episode’s latter half, in which Earn’s Uncle Willy (a sharp, redemptive performance by Katt Williams) reveals that he keeps a full-grown alligator in his house and is known around the neighborhood as the Alligator Man.

The show plays it coy at first, never actually showing the alligator. But in the end, just as cops are about to storm Uncle Willy’s house, the front door opens and a full-grown alligator strolls out, to the regal Delfonics song “Hey Love.” It’s a moment that winks back at the viewer; “Florida Man Escapes Cops after Setting Pet Alligator Loose.” This scene typifies the show’s ability to slide between existence and the abstract, dreams and nightmares, taking cues from the real world and building a compressed, mythological dimension. There’s nothing else like it.