The show overflows with deadpan banter, dry pauses, and undermining jabs. Illustration by Richie Pope

When Louis C.K.’s warped anti-sitcom, “Louie,” débuted, in 2010, it kicked the door open to a new style of TV comedy, one that looked and felt more like an independent film. Two years later, Lena Dunham’s “Girls” took a similar not-everyone-needs-to-like-it approach. Copycats popped up everywhere. Some of these auteurish dramedies were watery or sour—hipper music and longer pauses don’t make everything profound. But the best of them possessed “Louie” ’s stubborn specificity: these shows didn’t try to speak to or for everyone.

Donald Glover’s “Atlanta,” on FX, is the most interesting of this fall’s wave of hyper-personal half hours. (Several are premièring one after another, including Tig Notaro’s “One Mississippi,” Pamela Adlon’s “Better Things,” Issa Rae’s “Insecure,” and Cameron Esposito and Rhea Butcher’s “Take My Wife”—a promising batch.) “Atlanta” is filmed near Stone Mountain, Georgia, where Glover grew up, and is set among characters who are mostly black and mostly poor, including rappers, drug dealers, and single moms. Glover knows plenty about making smart sitcoms: at twenty-two, he was writing for “30 Rock”; at twenty-six, he became famous as the sweet nerd Troy, on “Community.” Both shows were sitcoms about sitcoms, deconstructions of hacky network structures, bristling with meta-jokes. Glover’s musical persona, Childish Gambino, did something similar for hip-hop: he took a fanboy’s approach to the art form, both adoring and mocking.

In “Atlanta,” however, Glover is less concerned with pure joke density; instead, he emphasizes character and mood, place and flow, a different type of originality. To create the show, he assembled a team of black men (and one black woman), including his brother, Stephen, the majority of whom have never worked in a network writers’ room. The show’s director, Hiro Murai, has primarily made music videos, including those for Childish Gambino. The result is a series that is shrewd, emotional, and impolite, with a style that veers toward pretentiousness but never crosses over. “Atlanta” has quiet craftiness and the power of precision, right down to the faded giraffe-print sofa in a drug dealer’s apartment.

Earnest (Earn) Marks, the character Glover plays, isn’t a wunderkind, like his creator. But he is, like Glover, a sardonic observer addicted to the side-eye, the sort of person who says, “That’s not a thing.” While other black men read him as a college-kid hipster, he’s in economic free fall. He has a young daughter with his on-and-off girlfriend, Van. His job, signing people up for credit cards on commission, pays little. At some point, he attended Princeton, a backstory he’s cagey about explaining, even to his parents, who babysit but won’t let him in their house. In the pilot, Earn approaches his older cousin, a rapper named Paper Boi, about becoming his manager. “Ain’t you homeless?” Paper Boi asks. “Not real homeless,” Earn replies. “I’m not using a rat as a phone or something.” “Don’t be racist, man,” Paper Boi says. “That make you schizophrenic, it don’t make you homeless.” Darius, Paper Boi’s stoned consigliere, dreamily considers the possibility for real: “Everybody would have an affordable phone. I mean . . . it’d be messy. But worth it.”

That’s a typical joke for the show, which overflows with shooting-the-shit banter, dry little pauses, and undermining jabs, with Earn and Paper Boi providing the deadpan and Darius the clownish free association. There are plenty of memorable scenes with Earn, especially when he’s placed in an unfamiliar environment—a pawnshop, for instance, or the loft of a dealer in samurai swords—and he’s most interesting when he’s as disoriented as he is judgmental. The standout is a long, surreal sequence in which he’s stuck in a police-station holding room full of other black people, all of whom know the rules better than he does.

Still, as good as Glover is, it’s Paper Boi who feels like the most original character. Played with weary authority by Brian Tyree Henry, Paper Boi seems, at first, like a confident O.G. He’s a low-level drug dealer; he’s a musician and the proud inventor of the compound sexual verb “mucking” (for “massage and . . .”). But Paper Boi, with his paunch and sweaty brow, also comes off as fascinatingly depressed by impending fame, thrown by how fans perceive him as a symbol of street authenticity—it’s as if he’s become a nostalgic nineties sensation before he’s even been signed by a label. “You’ve been arrested for weed. It’s not that bad, right?” Earn asks nervously. “It’s not as good as not getting arrested for weed,” Paper Boi says, with a shrug.

In one perfectly edited bit of surreality, Paper Boi hangs out at home, slouched on a beaten-up leather sofa. There’s a knock on the door. Darius answers it, and waiting outside is a guy in a Batman mask, in extreme closeup. “Paper Boi in today?” Batman asks, inscrutable. “Yeaaaah?” Darius drawls, hilariously spooked. “O.K.!” Batman replies, then spins around and scampers away. Paper Boi joins Darius at the door and they both stand there, silhouetted from the back. “You too hot,” Darius concludes.

Each episode has an A plot and a B plot, but no C plot, as a conventional sitcom would. The pacing has a sly slo-mo quality, with a joke often planted up front—like a debate about whether black people know who the film star Steve McQueen is—then kicked to the next goal. The conversations between Earn and Van, in particular, are just realistic arguments between exhausted parents trying to figure out where they stand; they can be a bit mumblecore, because Van doesn’t get to be funny. But “Atlanta” has enough laughs not to stall. The best are often understated gags, like when Earn is eating cookies at Paper Boi’s house, and Darius suddenly says, “Damn, man, it’s four-thirty. We late.” The next scene reveals the three of them smoking a joint on a battered sofa in the middle of a field: four-twenty is what they were late for.

Glover is seductively masculine in this role—he’s frequently shown half-naked in bed, lazily fondling Van so that she’ll let him stay the night. If “Atlanta” were just about Earn, with his anime-pretty features and his boyish inability to commit, it might get static. Instead, deeper themes keep welling up, especially the conundrum of a society that fetishizes ghetto cool but marginalizes the men who embody it. (Black masculinity is a set of poses that everyone imitates, including black men.) In a nicely nasty sequence in the pilot, a douchey white d.j. tells Earn a story that ends with the word “nigga.” It’s a pure expression of privilege: Earn needs the d.j. as a contact, so he has to let this awful guy act like his buddy. Later, however, Earn forces the d.j. to tell the same story to the tougher, scarier Paper Boi, along with Darius—to tell it to three black men instead of one black man. The d.j. leaves out the crucial word, his eyes fluttering in panic. It’s the closest the show comes to victory.

In the fourth episode, a different kind of antagonist emerges, one who uses the same word, and he’s much more alarming to Earn and Paper Boi than some random white guy. Zan (Freddie Kuguru), a monstrous, racially ambiguous hip-hop entrepreneur with a malevolent Bugs Bunny intensity, skillfully inserts himself into a casual conversation as if he were already part of the crew. He won’t stop texting and taking pictures—One for the ’gram! And one more for the Snapchat!—spouting memes, and hustling branded “sneakies,” like a walking, talking embodiment of WorldStarHipHop, inflected with Perez Hilton. As with the viral hype-men that Keegan-Michael Key and Jordan Peele parodied during MTV’s Video Music Awards, it’s hard to tell if Zan’s a parody, since he’s parodying a self-parody.

Still, Zan does have a viral following, one that he threatens to turn against Paper Boi. “I mean . . . is he Dominican, man?” Paper Boi sputters in bafflement. Whatever his race, resistance is just more fodder for Zan, because there’s no distinction for him between exploitation and art. “We’re all just hustling,” he explains semi-sincerely. “It’s all part of the game, brah.” Paper Boi protests that, compared with Zan, he has fewer choices: his looks—heavy, dark-skinned, male—dictate his path. It’s “Atlanta” ’s most promising theme. The fact that the show itself is filmed in a gritty, low-key style only deepens that tension: it’s a debate about authenticity framed by a TV genre whose creators, like rappers, are fixated on the creative possibilities of keeping it real. ♦