The touch can be hard to detect. But try dusting for fingerprints. It’s Mary Richards’s suppressing a crackup at the funeral for Chuckles the Clown, then bursting into tears when the priest tells her Chuckles would have wanted her to laugh. It’s the deli fake-orgasm scene in “When Harry Met Sally” and just about every episode of “Seinfeld.”

“Atlanta” has a not-dissimilar finesse. But where Lubitsch set his sights on sex, “Atlanta” plays with race, fame, money and moods. It’s how you forget that that invisible car took out some clubgoers as it zoomed away from gunfire. It’s how Van (Zazie Beetz) discovers that the Drake doing Instagram selfies with scores of women isn’t Drake at all, just some cardboard that, for $20, you can pose with, too. It’s the way a shot of Earn watching Alfred record something at the offices of a Spotify-like outfit captures a blurry sea of mostly white employees feasting their gaze upon the rapper. He turns around, and they all scramble back to what they’d been doing earlier; even the phones remember to resume ringing. It’s a line like “It’s Michael Vick” or, from Thursday’s finale, “For systemic reasons.”

The “Atlanta” touch is fantasy and depression, weed and trauma; the unshakable, unnamable savoriness of certain dreams. Actually, in lots of moments — facial expressions, silences, décor — it’s all five tastes coming over you at once. The touch gets at the sometimes simultaneous sinking and buoyancy of being black in America. “Atlanta” specializes in the properties of blackness, the adjustment of heft and levity for bizarrely emotional effect. It’s a form of both irony and telepathy — knowing that you’ll know what is being unsaid. Robert Townsend, Dave Chappelle and Key and Peele made similar adjustments on their sketch shows, but within the precincts of satire and farce. The “Atlanta” touch works under all situations, comedic and otherwise. Blackness isn’t a cause or a solution but a state of being around which anything is possible. It’s another show about nothing, but where nothing can’t stay nothing for long.

Could the “Atlanta” touch spread beyond “Atlanta”? Could it reach, say, Donald Glover himself? Maybe not. Last week, as his musical persona, Childish Gambino, he released a single and video for a provocation called “This Is America.” The song is a gumbo of Afrobeat, trap music and Lionel Richie. The video strives to lament the hypocrisies of armed violence, mass entertainment and fame. It’s set in a sunlit warehouse filled with parked cars, human chaos and chickens, at the heart of which is a shirtless Mr. Glover who writhes and undulates around the space. He pulls a pistol from his pants and shoots a man playing guitar, then is soon tossed an assault rifle so he can mow down the gospel choir providing accompaniment. He rarely stops moving. Neither do the uniformed school kids doing the gwara gwara and the Roy Purdy behind him.