“Comedy in the black community is almost always about struggle,” said Mary Pattillo, author of “Black Picket Fences: Privilege and Peril Among the Black Middle Class.” “And while exploring class differences is not new for black sitcoms, it is important that these themes are reproduced and restaged for each generation. The specifics might be different, but every generation returns to this theme because the precarity of the black middle class has not disappeared.”

On “Atlanta,” we meet Earn, a Princeton dropout who grew up in a middle-class family and who works at an airport kiosk. He quits that job to manage his cousin, an up-and-coming rapper named Alfred Miles, known as Paper Boi (Brian Tyree Henry), who has a song on the radio but makes a living as a drug dealer. Earn’s economic instability is exacerbated when his on-and-off girlfriend and his daughter’s mother, Van (Zazie Beetz), loses her job as an elementary schoolteacher because it was the only constant source of income for the family.

“‘Atlanta’ offers up a realistic portrait of the vulnerability that the black middle class faces today,” said Jessica S. Welburn, a sociologist at the University of Iowa who researches African-American downward mobility. “While the election of the first African-American president gives many a sense of progress, racial disparities have also intensified and limited what has typically been a pathway to the middle class for African-Americans, like a college degree or a government job. Knowing this, African-Americans still try to break through these barriers with obviously mixed results.”

“The Jacket,” the season finale of “Atlanta,” offers up one of the most pointed critiques of structural racism that I have seen on television this year: Neither Earn’s middle-class childhood nor his Princeton education can protect him from the constraints that he and his friends find themselves under. After Earn wakes up in a strange house in a strange bed without his jacket, we follow him on an increasingly desperate search in increasingly dangerous situations. He finally arrives outside the home of the Uber driver who has his jacket, only to witness him being shot by the police.