The eyes have it. The central foursome of Donald Glover’s masterly Atlanta often fumble to find the right words to articulate their thoughts or feelings, but telegraph their deepest and most honest selves by doing nothing more than looking.

As hapless hustler Earn, Glover has mastered a sort of ocular shrug that conveys his resignation to a world repeatedly proving itself confusing, illogical and unfair. Brian Tyree Henry portrays Earn’s cousin and managerial client Alfred (aka up-and-coming rapper Paper Boi) with the same thousand-yard stare of withering, perpetual over-it-ness that Daniel Kaluuya used as a visual shorthand for exasperation with white nonsense in Get Out. As Van, Earn’s on-again-off-again girlfriend and the full-time mother of their child, Zazie Beetz has a bit more light behind her eyes; she’s the most hopeful of the group. And then there’s the hood koan dispenser Darius, played by Lakeith Stanfield with a spaced-out gaze placing him in some obscure corner of the fifth dimension clouded by cannabis smoke.

The sophomore run of this black comedy (in both senses of the phrase) thrusts these four characters back into an Atlanta only slightly removed from our own, where the struggles of street life manifest as comic premises exposing their core absurdity. Earn faces blatant racism everywhere he goes, though often in petty, banal or ironic terms. Plans for an upscale night out with Van are stymied by a hundred-dollar bill nobody will believe is real; for a black man on the town, even having money creates money problems. All the while, dictates of polite (read: white-dominated) society require that they constrain their frustrations to the non-verbal.

A glance can be salvation when it’s the only appropriate reaction to the weird, darkly inane social scrapes that have a way of finding Earn and company. One of the new episodes begins with Paper Boi getting robbed at gunpoint by a buddy in dire financial straits. The reluctant stick-up man repeatedly apologizes to the man he still considers his friend, even as he tentatively demands his car keys. Alfred deploys another one of his incredulous side-eyes in response, situated perfectly between “are you kidding me?” and “fine, but make it quick”. This is the mental space all four characters occupy, an uncomfortable middle ground between anger over their hardships and a defeated surrender to them.

The second season, entitled Robbin’ Season, plumbs that hopelessness to unprecedented extremes, but never loses sight of tragedy’s close proximity to humor. The premiere sends Earn and Darius southward to check up on an unstable local assayed with gobsmacking profundity by Katt Williams. This tense passage functions as a nuanced character sketch of near-literary economy and a polemic against a system unwilling or uninterested in caring for the mentally unwell. But like one of Williams’ standup routines, it all culminates in a ridiculous and slightly surreal punchline involving an alligator and the Delfonics’ Hey Love. That moment, an arresting blend of comedy and commentary with a few drops of unexpected beauty, contains the whole of Atlanta.

Donald Glover and Zazie Beetz Photograph: FX

It might just contain a bit of Glover himself as well. Recently painted as a man with quite a bit on his mind in a cryptic, self-aggrandizing profile, Glover has cultivated an intensely personal relationship with his art ever since rapping about his suicidal impulses during his early mixtape days. The new episodes usher Paper Boi into the next echelon of success, but fame only proves alienating to him. It might not seem so bad when the cashier at his favorite chicken place hooks him up with an extra wing, but now he can’t even buy weed without someone furtively snapping his photo. An encounter with a sycophantic brand relations executive underscores one of the recurring fears in Glover’s body of work: nobody can be trusted when everybody wants something from you.

Like the great televisual landmarks before it – The Sopranos, for one, the Citizen Kane-level standard of TV greatness that resembles this show a little more with each passing year – Atlanta succeeds at being many things. It is an uncompromised referendum on being black in an age obsessed with defining what it means to be black; an experimental, occasionally playful laughter therapy session; an adroitly observed valentine to one of America’s great cities; a slow-burning love story blessedly free of mawkish BS.

This show shares the creatively fidgety temperament of the writer-turned-actor-turned-rapper-turned-director masterminding it, freely drifting into narrative alleyways and finding intrigue in every trap house. (A bullet-strewn showdown between a common crook and a ruthless fast-food manager rivals the action opuses of Michael Mann, and has no immediate bearing on the plot whatsoever.) It’s the kind of staggering accomplishment that makes a critic want to dust off the hyperbole he’s been saving for a special occasion, so here goes: intelligent, profound, and clever all at once, Atlanta hits the trifecta of smarts and makes it look casual. It’s TV’s funniest drama and most bruising comedy. It’s the best thing currently running on the small screen, full stop.