'Atlanta' Sets Final Season Premiere Date, Donald Glover Promises 'Good Ending'

Donald Glover has one last thing to say. FX's Atlanta has set a premiere date for the fourth and final season: Thursday, Sept. 15, the network announced Tuesday.

In the series' final chapter, Earn (Donald Glover), Alfred ‘Paper Boi’ Miles (Brian Tyree Henry), Darius (LaKeith Stanfield) and Van (Zazie Beetz) are back in their hometown. But the question is, has Atlanta changed, or have they? Donald previewed the upcoming final season during a virtual Television Critics Association press tour panel on Tuesday, revealing that the theme he and the writers landed was an amalgamation of their six-year journey with the comedy. 

"The theme for the last season we ended up landing on was 'have more fun' because, you know, life is short. At a certain point you're just like, let's just have more fun. And you can do literally whatever you want with the time you literally have. That's basically what we landed on. We talked a lot about that in season 4, I think...," he told reporters over Zoom. "People can do whatever they want, you just have to find your own happiness and that's a whole process. Not to make it sound like therapy, but yeah, just have more fun. That was the heart of it."

"There was just a lot of conversation about choice for season 4," executive producer Stefani Robinson added. "The idea that you can actually be active in your own life and make the choices that you want to make, which is sort of another way to say what Donald said. You can have more fun and you don't really have to do anything. Exploring that idea and being active in your own life is really important."

Donald's brother and fellow executive producer, Stephen Glover, reflected on the legacy he hopes Atlanta will come to represent once the series wraps up. "I think the legacy of it is going to be about experimentation and how much weird stuff we've been able to do," he said. "Hopefully that leads other people to want to take risks and do weird stuff too. Hopefully that's the legacy we lead."

Asked specifically about the ending Atlanta, Donald was confident about the way everything lands for all the characters.

"I think we have a pretty good ending," he said. "We wrote an episode in the middle and then we were like, 'This is so great... This has to be the last episode!' And then we were like, 'Oh yeah, this does work.' Our show started kind of punk, like no one cares. We were like, no one cares about a lot of stuff -- that was my mindset anyway, no one cares. But by the end, we cared about a lot of stuff. A lot of our lives changed in a lot of ways. We kind of grew up. We ended up being a show about people and before it was about do people matter?"

Watch the official trailer for the final season below.

Atlanta returns for its final season Thursday, Sept. 15 on FX.

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