One of my all-time favorite episodes of The Boondocks is when Robert scores a role in the fictional playwright Winston Jerome’s play Ma Dukes Finds Herself a Man. Robert’s time at Jerome’s studio is a flawless parody of the enigma that is Tyler Perry as Ma Dukes is a theatrical Black matriarch played by Jerome himself in drag. Huey describes Jerome’s body of work as following a predictable formula: A beautiful educated Black woman is in an abusive marriage with a dark-skinned man until she finds a light-skinned gardener with a troubled past and they fall in love, vowing to live their lives through Christ. Robert discovers Jerome is actually a closeted gay man who claims Jesus himself tells him what to write to help spread the Christian message through half-naked men. It’s revealed that Jerome is running a homoerotic cultish production whose members cannot contact their families and have to dedicate their lives to Jerome and Jesus.
In tonight’s Atlanta, Donald Glover presents his own parody of Tyler Perry through Van’s chaotic day at Mr. Chocolate Studios, which sounds more like an amusement park than a movie studio. She’s following a friend’s advice by taking a small role in one of Kirkwood Chocolate’s movies for some extra cash and so that Lottie, whom she’s brought along, has the opportunity to see her mom doing something cool. Van admits to an employee on the lot that she hasn’t seen much of Chocolate’s work, but what she has seen isn’t exactly to her taste. The posters on the lot and the scenes we see being filmed are indicative of how deep Atlanta’s satire of Perry runs: There’s an actress eating a crack sandwich, actresses playing abused Black women desperate for love, and advertisements for a movie called Ain’t Crazy and its sequel, Still Ain’t Crazy. My favorite nod to Perry’s notoriously hackneyed style? When a random extremely handsome light-skinned maintenance man with a criminal record who is trying to turn his life around approaches Van while she’s in makeup — an almost direct nod to the Boondocks episode.
Like Perry’s own 330-acre studio in Atlanta, Mr. Chocolate Studios is a sprawling lot with multiple soundstages and office spaces. From my research (looking on Wikipedia), it seems Perry’s Atlanta studio has more than 20 soundstages, including sets for an airplane, a coffee shop, and, of course, a trailer park, county jail, prison yard, and courtroom. The entire thing is a larger-than-life operation with a single man pulling all the strings. Atlanta plays on this by injecting major Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory energy to Van’s experiences on the lot.
What Van believes will be a quick adventure turns into a pivotal moment for her as a mother. After hair and makeup, Van transforms into the best friend of, you guessed it, a depressed Black woman in a toxic relationship with a dark-skinned bald man. While shooting the scene, which has a terrible script, Chocolate directs not from the set but by watching from a camera in his office and communicating through a loudspeaker, evoking the ever-elusive Wonka. Lottie, being very much her parents’ child, loudly tells the abusive husband to shut up. Van apologizes for Lottie’s outburst, but Chocolate’s omnipresent voice demands that Lottie join the scene, impressed by her charisma and stage presence. At first, Van is hesitant, but Lottie is eager, so she allows it. Chocolate loves her performance and adds her to the show, indifferent to how adding a new character this late into production might inconvenience his employees. His reach is powerful; without speaking a word, his threatening silence stops the PA from questioning his choice any further.
Van takes Lottie to wardrobe to get her fitted, and a woman working in the costume department can sense her unease. Van expresses her concern about putting Lottie onscreen at such a young age, but the woman imparts Christian-inspired advice based on a Bible verse, telling her, “Whoever is not open to the joys of a child, like their own child, is not really open to true happiness.” Taking the advice, Van tells Lottie, who is having the time of her life playing with the clothes, that if she ever feels uncomfortable, she just has to give her mom the thumbs-down sign and they can leave, no questions asked.
Lottie is then shuffled from soundstage to soundstage, delivering sassy lines in 14 scenes of the in-progress projects at Mr. Chocolate Studios, not once turning her thumb down for her mother. They move her around so quickly that Van eventually loses track of her but is saved by the maintenance man, who escorts her to the correct stage — but not without charming Van and giving her his card. Van discovers the other sets are just as overstretched and unprofessional: When she asks an employee about her daughter’s whereabouts, the employee tells Van she’s too overworked to know where Lottie is as she’s not only directing two pilots but starring in another, and Mr. Chocolate is the only one who knows what’s actually going on. But she agrees to take Van to the lot where Lottie is.
At this point, Van is angry about being separated from Lottie and tired of playing into the charade that Chocolate is somehow a renowned auteur of Black film. She goes in on the scripts and crack sandwiches and blatantly says just because he won “Black awards” doesn’t mean his work is good. One of his employees responds with the famous Issa Rae quote, “I’m rooting for everybody Black,” to which Van asks, “Even O.J.?” Chocolate’s followers chorus back, “Even O.J.”
As Van watches Lottie in her next scene, the words from the script mirror the insecurities she’s feeling at the moment. Lottie asks her fictional crack-sandwich-eating mother, “Why didn’t you protect me? Isn’t that what mothers are supposed to do?” Following the scene, Lottie is quickly whisked away, sending Van to the end of her rope. She storms over to Chocolate’s offices, determined to get Lottie back. His offices are protected by military-grade-looking security officers whom Van tries to bypass without success. But the woman from wardrobe appears and shoots one of the guards in the foot on Van’s behalf. It turns out the guards posted out front actually had fake weapons, making the shot unnecessary, but the security guard at the entrance was right — I was very surprised by who snuck a gun into the studio.
Now inside his office, Van comes face to face with Kirkwood Chocolate … who turns out to be Glover himself in special-effects makeup that has him looking like a bald, bloated, pretentious playwright with tiny glasses and a beret poised on his head. Like the iconic Teddy Perkins episode, we’re reminded of how Glover is a comedy man at heart. Kirkwood is another eccentric character; he’s seen banging on a piano gifted to him by Steve Jobs that produces scripts as he slams nonsensically on the keys. Watching him churn out pages and pages of writing is another poignant critique of Perry, who proudly proclaimed he writes everything on his own without collaborating with a writers’ room. We can tell. Anyway, when Van insists he return Lottie to her, Kirkwood tells her it’s beyond his control as the entire operation now runs independently. He describes Mr. Chocolate Studios as his child, a daughter he protects and guides but doesn’t possess. Van threatens to call the police, and Kirkwood screams in her face that he can do whatever he wants. She throws some of the hot grits he’s been cooking at his face and declares that he’s a con man who creates “unrelatable shit” that takes advantage of the people he says he’s trying to help.
Lottie is brought back to the office now that things are escalating, but Kirkwood uses his camera footage to demonstrate exactly how relatable his work is. He shows her how she’s a struggling single mother with a formerly incarcerated light-skinned love interest, a dark-skinned baby daddy, and a gun-touting Christian grandma. He offers Lottie a contract for her own six-season show, an idea Lottie enjoys, but Van refuses it and ignores Lottie’s subsequent temper tantrum. Back at home, she tells Lottie she understands that she was enjoying herself and she’s sorry she won’t have a show. She then gives her daughter a talk most little Black girls hear many times. “You represent something. And I know it isn’t fair, but what you do matters a lot. And I just really want you to be old enough to decide what you want to represent because I can’t always protect you,” she says, echoing the voices of many Black moms who came before her.
Atlanta After Hours
• In last week’s recap, I mistakenly said Atlanta had only one female writer. But this episode was written by Janine Nabers. I loved that final mother-daughter scene and what it represented; I thought it was beautifully written. Also Nabers and Glover are collaborating again on a forthcoming series.
• The bad wigs are another hilarious shot at Perry. It stresses me out to no end that Perry is sitting on millions yet he forces audiences to look at the worst synthetic wigs I’ve ever seen. If I know people in Ohio with better wigs, Perry has no excuse.
• Seeing the fans and employees of Chocolate passionately revere his work because of the representation is a theme throughout the episode. It speaks to the real desperation in the Black community for media that truly belongs to us. But Atlanta and many critics of Perry ask two questions of us: Do we as Black people have to support anything and everything that’s Black? And does Perry’s shallow depiction of us do more harm than good?