When Donald Glover set out to make "This Is America," he knew it would be easy to fail. "There was a lot of room for it to be bad," Glover told me when I got him on the phone recently. "Like: really, really bad. Like preachy bad. Over-reaching bad. Pretentious, racist-in-a-different-way bad."

When the four-minute music video/mini-polemic that featured his alter ego, Childish Gambino, hit the Internet back in May, it wasn't any of those things. Instead, its allusions to the Charleston church massacre, to Jim Crow–era minstrel shows, and to police brutality seemed a perfect crystallization of our national mood—a grim snapshot of where we are now. But Glover still believes his performance, which has been viewed 435 million times on YouTube, would have fallen short if not for the person I'd called to ask him about: his longtime collaborator, the Tokyo-born, Los Angeles–raised director Hiro Murai.

"You fall into a bad place when you try to preach and be a translator to people," Glover said, explaining that Murai—whom he calls a master of restraint—evokes instead of explicates. "I don't think Hiro believes in translating. He believes the audience has integrity at the end of the day. He believes in a world where we're supposed to make something brand new. And that's where the magic lays."

Magic comes up a lot when people talk about Murai. Partly that's because his body of work—mostly music videos and TV episodes, and maybe someday soon a feature film—is often defiantly surreal. Murai, who is 35, has helmed the most talked-about episodes of Glover's television series Atlanta, whose depiction of the struggling rapper Paper Boi, his cousin-manager Earn, and their friend Darius, has changed the definition of what a half-hour comedy series can be. The show is unpredictable, less tethered to plot than to what it feels like to be young and striving in a city like Atlanta. Its characters live on the outskirts, symbolically if not literally, and Murai's sensibility meshes well with the sense of happenstance and powerlessness that dominates their lives.

The show unfolds according to its own set of rules. Remember the episode in which a celebrity sped by in an invisible car? Or the one that featured a black Justin Bieber? Or the one in which Earn's Uncle Willy keeps an enormous alligator in his house as a pet? Remember how these things were presented without explanation—as unsurprising, even mundane? Murai directed all those episodes, and also the one called "Teddy Perkins," which got him nominated for an Emmy this year.

Bill Hader, who sought out Murai last year to direct a couple episodes of his dark HBO comedy, Barry, told me he especially loved the "Teddy Perkins" episode, in which Darius (Lakeith Stanfield) picks up a piano at the mansion of an aging, reclusive celebrity (Teddy, played by Glover in whiteface). There are echoes of the late Michael Jackson in Glover's unctuous, menacing portrayal, which was achieved with the help of prosthetics and a bob-cut wig. The episode's dimly lit, claustrophobic visuals have foreboding to spare.

"I watched it before we started our first day of shooting on Barry, just to be inspired," said Hader, who wanted his show—about a midwestern hitman who yearns to make it as a Hollywood actor—to have its own edginess. "Teddy Perkins" struck him then, as it does now, as a masterpiece. "It was like the band was playing 'Sergeant Pepper' or something," Hader said. "It was one of the best things I'd ever seen in my life. It was just like, 'Let's aspire to this.'" So awestruck was Hader, he admitted, that it became difficult at times not to be self-conscious around Murai. "What do you say to your friend after that?" he asked. "It's like Hiro just flew. Like: 'Yeah, so you can fly now, huh? You're like a different species of creature.'"