Atlanta is surrealist and dark and funny and nuanced and 100% necessary viewing. The laser-sharp dialogue cuts right to the essence of race in America, socioeconomic status, privilege, and countless other aspects of culture that haven’t even been touched by other TV shows.

Atlanta is about its characters more than anything. Earn (Donald Glover) is a Princeton dropout who is technically homeless but lives with the mother of his daughter. He starts managing his cousin Alfred “Paper Boi” Miles (Brian Tyree Henry) with the help of Miles’ right hand man Darius (Lakeith Stanfield) in the hopes of bettering his own life and supporting his family. It’s a simple premise but as we see throughout the series, simple doesn’t mean boring. Atlanta isn’t about extraordinary events, it’s about the everyday. Where a lot of shows feel the need to overdramatize events or throw curveballs to keep the viewer hooked, Atlanta creates an honest, intimate type of reality that makes you feel like you’re getting a private look into the lives of the characters.

What strikes me the most about Atlanta is how it’s able to convey messages with such clarity while never seeming contrived. In an episode that centers around Earn waiting to be bailed out of jail, the show presents a character who very clearly has some mental health issues. He’s featured for only one scene, but in that time Atlanta finds a way to introduce a systemic problem, address why it’s matters, and connect it to the overuse of police brutality. Watching the situation unfold is more than enough to see the consequences of our current policy. It’s a disturbing, potent scene and that’s what makes it so necessary.

Atlanta is also one of the only shows to accurately portray poverty. It’s not the kind of poor that we often see on television: characters are “broke” but never repeat outfits, characters who technically have jobs but we never see them work, or characters who only bring up financial problems when it’s relevant to this week’s episode. Earn’s financial situation is emphasized through little instances like when he tries to order a kids meal, or asks his cousin to send money to his bank account in the middle of a date that became more expensive than he planned. He states in one episode, “I’m poor. And poor people don’t have time for investments. I need to eat today, not in September.” With that one line of dialogue he reiterates the sense of immediacy that poverty forces on people. It hangs over every episode of the show, and there is no room to trip up since one mistake is the difference between sleeping in a home or on the street.