In the presidential debates and at campaign rallies, Donald J. Trump has indulged a fondness for the equation of black life and hell: Happiness is scarce, and misery, poverty and violence afflict all. That’s a certain white man’s view of black life, as seen on his TV set — in 1989, when the Huxtables were the only prominent African-Americans visible amid proliferating news images of “dangerous” black people. Television in 2016, with its bounty of black shows, both rebukes and complicates that dehumanizing assessment. And the show doing that with the most farcical tang, at the moment, is “Atlanta,” now in its first season on FX.

The premise is otherwise sitcom standard: A Princeton dropout named Earn (Donald Glover) comes back home to Atlanta and tries to manage the rap career of his weed-dealer cousin, Alfred (Brian Tyree Henry), and help raise a toddler with his baby mama, Van (Zazie Beetz). It’s the old wayward-son-returns model. But the show, which Mr. Glover created, doesn’t obsess over that premise nearly so much as explore its felicitous human topography. This is a sitcom that, in devoting an entire episode to a day in the life of Van, managed to twist a very good episode of “Girlfriends” into hungover, guns-holstered Tarantino. Elsewhere, if the sideways Atlanta rap acts Goodie Mob and OutKast were to write for “Seinfeld,” you might get something like the episode set on a fake, black cable network’s fake, black “Charlie Rose”-style show and situated around questions of sexual and racial authenticity.

“Atlanta” is rigorously attuned to the comedy of being alive. A lot of that life springs from the craziest sources: accents, T-shirts, cartons of glowing food, a pudgy school kid in whiteface, jail. But mostly it comes from the bit players of “Atlanta.” A lot of them are played by actors who actually hail from the city or nearby, and, all together, they’re the boxes under a Christmas tree. The writing does a lot of the work here, as does the directing, most of which is by Hiro Murai, who is Japanese. But for a show that combines low-key naturalism and a steady helping of the surreal, you also need actors who don’t seem as if they’re “working.” That’s a long way of saying that “Atlanta” is one of the best cast and most brightly acted shows of any kind on TV.