By the time Hiro Murai appeared at the wooden gate of his Silver Lake Craftsman-style cottage, I had already experienced 15 minutes of disoriented panic in the nearly 90-degree sun. The sequence involved an unanswered doorbell, a growing conviction that I had come to the wrong place, an open door nearby, and a startling encounter with a straw-hatted workman who was tugging a giant stuffed animal on a rope. It was the kind of heightened, almost hallucinatory series of mundane events that so often unravels on Atlanta, the FX series for which Murai serves as a co–executive producer and director.

Murai is Atlanta’s visual mastermind, the invisible eye behind the best show on television right now; its snapshots of the lifestyle of a rising rapper and his slacker manager are both hilarious and unsettling. Over the course of their five-year collaboration, Murai and the show’s creator, Donald Glover, have built up an influential body of work that includes not just Atlanta but also music videos for Glover’s alter ego, Childish Gambino, including this spring’s controversial “This Is America,” which pulled in 85.3 million views on YouTube in a week.

Murai is now enjoying the opportunities that come with such acclaim. (The show has received 16 Emmy nominations, including outstanding comedy series and outstanding director for a comedy series for Murai.) After branching out to executive-produce and direct the Amazon pilot Sea Oak, written by Booker Prize–winning author George Saunders, and directing episodes of series such as Legion, Snowfall, and Barry, the 35-year-old Murai has signed a deal with FX to develop his own TV shows and is fielding potential movie projects. The deluge is a little overwhelming, Murai admits as we sit down at the long yellow picnic table on his back deck. But he says he has absorbed some lessons in chill from Glover. “I remember when Atlanta first happened, I didn’t know what to expect,” Murai recalls. “It felt like it was a lot of responsibility. But one of the best things Donald said to me was ‘I don’t care if this gets canceled. Let’s just do, like, the craziest thing we can do.’ ” Murai took Glover’s reckless spirit to heart, creating a visual poem that lingers in your memory long after the laughter has faded. Atlanta feels like a singular experience, both in terms of whose story it tells (sensitive, eccentric, poor black characters) and how the show tells it: obliquely, quietly (despite the hip soundtrack), and with pathos. It has a laid-back stoner vibe that lends itself to wordless enjoyment of its visual jokes, yet it’s packed with enough sociopolitical detail to withstand academic deconstruction. The series veers between deadpan realism, existential melancholy, and wild absurdism. On any given week, the writers might concoct, say, an elaborate tableau involving an invisible car (“The Club”) or a mansion inhabited by a ghost-faced recluse (“Teddy Perkins”).

“I like the idea of taking an absurd premise and really trying to deliver it on every level, and I think a lot of this show, it just really feels like a dare sometimes,” says Murai, who has directed two-thirds of the series’ episodes. The invisible car started as a joke in the writers’ room, but he and Glover kept returning to it, wondering, as Murai now puts it: “Can this world have an invisible car and still be a believable, functioning world?” He continues, “The one thing about seeing how elastic the world is, is at a certain point you might pop it and it might not be a believable world anymore. So it’s kind of a game of chicken, you know?”