Speaking at the Television Critics Association’s winter press tour, Landgraf told reporters (via Deadline) that Atlanta’s next two seasons will be its last.
“After a four year absence, we’re graced with the return of Atlanta,” Landgraf said. “Donald Glover and his team have shot the final two seasons of the series.”
Season 3 of Atlanta, which Newsweek reported was shot primarily in Europe, will premiere on March 24 on FX, and will be available on Hulu for in-season streaming. After that, Landgraf revealed Season 4 will follow a similar schedule later on in the year.
“The fourth and final season is slated to debut in the same manner in the fall,” he said. “The new season is everything you’d expect from Atlanta—which is to say expect the unexpected.”
“Sit back and enjoy the trip,” Landgraf added.
Glover, who also spoke with media during FX’s TCA panel, addressed the imminent end of his five-time Emmy Award-winning television show.
“To be honest, I kind of wanted it to end after Season 2,” Glover told reporters. “When the conditions are right for something to happen, it happens, and when they’re not, it doesn’t.”
“The story was always supposed to be what it was,” the Atlanta creator and star added.
Despite a previous desire to wrap up the show after just two seasons, and a four year hiatus that has left fans yearning for a hint at what’s to come next, Glover also told reporters (via Yahoo) that the third season of Atlanta was written in 2019—even though it might not seem like it.
“It’s so frustrating. I’m gonna try and get FX to put a disclaimer before [the episodes],” he said. “It’s like we wrote all of this in 2019. A lot of this stuff is gonna seem like a parody of stuff that happened, but we actually prophesied most of the sh*t in 2020. The world is extremely predictable. We really just knew how a lot of this stuff was gonna pan out.”
While the upcoming season of Atlanta may seem prophetic to viewers when it premieres next month, its fourth-and-final season will reportedly be more reactive to what has happened since the onset of COVID-19. Following nearly two years of a global pandemic and a near-complete transformation of how fans consume content, Glover said tweaks to Season 4 were inevitable.
“I think we all changed,” Glover said. “I think we all got older and just went through our life, and I think COVID was a very reflective time…all of us kind of grew up.”
“The show is very punk, I think,” he added. “I think we became more not punk, because we cared about stuff.”
Last Halloween, the 38-year-old Glover shared a link to Gilga.com on Twitter. Upon clicking the link, daytime users are directed to a simple website displaying the message “While under construction, Gilga is a ’nite-site’ Operational hours are 8pm-3am.”
For users visiting the site between 8 p.m. and 3 a.m., a teaser for Atlanta’s third season is made available.
In the months since Glover posted the Gilga link, two more trailers have been released, each showing Glover and co-stars Brian Tyree Henry, LaKeith Stanfield and Zazie Beetz making their way across Europe as Henry’s Paper Boi character traverses the continent during his international hip-hop tour.
While few specific Season 3 plot details have been revealed, Glover told reporters that fans can expect Atlanta to go bigger than it ever has before.
“Season 3 is kind of like our maximalists season. I think it’s us being like, ‘Yo, we’re in control but what does that mean? Why did we ever get here? What is this really?,’” he said. “Just leaving Atlanta and being like ‘OK, the world is out there and it’s not Atlanta.’”
“There are different rules, different places, and people go through different things,” he added. “So it is like fish out of water.”
