Atlanta is inarguably one of the best, most innovative shows currently being made. Written largely by Donald and Stephen Glover, and an all-black writers’ room staffed by people with a deep knowledge of Atlanta, the series is rooted in a specific place, and its intimate relationship with a “magic city,” as my colleague Vann Newkirk wrote in 2016. Its distinct visual style, created by the music-video director Hiro Murai, turns even the most dreary settings into punchy, saturated images. But the key element of Atlanta is its willingness to push boundaries—to flip from violence to humor and back again with unnerving speed, or to spend an entire half-hour episode without Glover’s character, pondering the intersection of racism and transphobia via a fake show named Montague (punctuated by fictional TV ads for Dodge Chargers and Swisher Sweets).

The first episode of the new season, “Alligator Man,” contains all these qualities and then some. The pre-credits sequence discombobulates viewers by opening with two entirely unfamiliar characters, who genially chat before heading out on an errand that jarringly shifts mood. The subtitle for the upcoming 10 episodes is “Robbin’ Season,” described by Darius (Lakeith Stanfield) as the time when “Christmas approaches and everybody gotta eat.” Hardly anyone can be trusted. The most mundane situations are freighted with tension, and every single person Earn encounters has a hustle in one form or another. But Atlanta still finds humor amid the apprehension, poking at hypocrisy and racism with sly jabs. Paper Boi is thrown when he discovers the ubiquity of white girls doing acoustic covers of his music on YouTube. And another white woman who’s recorded a tirade about Paper Boi’s lyrics goes viral; she finally weeps not at his references to drugs and sex, but at his Colin Kaepernick shoutout.

Still, Earn’s mounting anxiety as he intuits that everyone he meets is trying to take something from him begins to feel oppressive. It’s hard not to interpret these moments as an allegory for Glover’s own altered relationship with the world, his obligatory suspicions about what people want him to do, or to be. In a superb recent profile of Glover for The New Yorker, the writer Tad Friend observes his subject’s state of uneasiness, how “he feels constantly watched but rarely seen.” This translates in Atlanta as Earn and Paper Boi’s increasing conflicts about money—not the lack of it, which saturated the first season, but the unexpected problems that come with getting it. In the third episode, Earn struggles to spend a hundred-dollar bill, simply because everyone he tries to spend it with reacts with distrust. “It’s legal U.S. tender!” he says over and over, exasperated.

The four main performers (Zazie Beetz plays Earn’s on/off girlfriend Van) are reliably brilliant. Stanfield’s Darius, prone to moments of stoner philosophizing, is the show’s comic relief (“I would say nice to meet you but I don’t believe in time as a concept, so I’ll just say we always met,” is how he greets a new acquaintance), although other highlights from the new episodes include an exceedingly polite armed robber and the question of whether Paper Boi’s uncle (Katt Williams) actually has an alligator in his bathroom. As Paper Boi, Henry gives such an understated, tight performance that his moments of rage or dismay are potent by comparison.