How That Angry Christian Mom Parody Explains the Surreal Soul of Atlanta

This post contains spoilers about Atlanta Season 2, Episode 3.

In October 2016, a video of an angry Christian mother reciting the Vince Staples song “Norf Norf” went viral. In it, she says that she was driving with her young daughter and listening to the local radio station when the song, an explicit track about Staples’s rough youth in Long Beach, began playing, catching her off guard. “I couldn’t even believe the words I was listening to,” she fumes. Then she looks up the lyrics and dramatically reads them—n-word and all—occasionally pausing to sniffle and cry. All the while, one of her daughters is playing behind her, unaware that mommy is having a bit of a breakdown.

The video was instantly, mercilessly mocked online; an enterprising viewer even remixed her recitation, setting it to the actual “Norf Norf” beat. And though its cycle seemed to have come and gone, it’s now been resuscitated by a pitch-perfect parody in Season 2 of Donald Glover’s beautifully surreal Atlanta.

The episode, which premiered Thursday, opens with a near-identical take on the video, featuring a blonde woman freaking out over a song by Paper Boi (played by Brian Tyree Henry). Everything about the parody, from the way the woman oscillates between fury and sadness to her tiny daughter bopping around behind her, is perfectly staged. The idea for the parody came from Atlanta writer Jamal Olori, who dropped the original into the writing team’s group chat back in 2016—then watched as the controversy around it exploded throughout the day. The rest of the Atlanta team agreed; somehow, some way, they needed to incorporate this video into the show.

“It screamed ignorance,” Olori says of the original video. “He’s talking about what’s going on in his bubble, and to her, it’s just so jarring that she feels like she has to do something about it.”

FX executives, he notes, let them run with the idea to incorporate a parody into the show. “They just don’t know how people will take the things that we do,” he says with a laugh. “They let us do whatever we want to. . . . I don’t think they even realized that was a parody of another video.”

At the time, Staples responded to the original video by tweeting that the woman who made it was clearly “frightened” and “emotionally unstable,” but still had a right to express herself. “No person needs to be attacked for their opinion on what they see to be appropriate for their children,” he tweeted.

Still, there’s something inherently funny about the original video—its dramatic agita, her assumption that everyone agrees there is something evil about the lyrics. That bold assumption was also what drew Olori to the clip. “What she didn’t realize is just how unforgiving and dark a place the Internet is,” he says. “She wanted a reaction of people supporting her. What actually happened was the song itself got more popular, essentially.”

What the woman who made the video needed was a better understanding of the Internet at large—an understanding that Atlanta’s team has firmly grasped. The last two episodes of the series have also seamlessly woven in nods to bizarro aspects of online culture, from the subversion of the Florida Man meme to corny, toothless acoustic guitar covers of popular rap songs. There are few shows on air today that understand Internet culture quite like Atlanta does. Though shows like Silicon Valley and American Vandal grasp the business and social sides of the tech worlds, respectively, Atlanta understands its slippery underbelly—the nano-moments that become eternal memes, building a fabric that tethers people to the online world.

The writing team has been more intent on this material this season, Olori notes, dreaming up scenarios that feed into the show’s surreal nature. This episode, for example, ends with Earn racing a tuckered Michael Vick, the former Atlanta Falcons quarterback, in a strip-club parking lot. (Their original idea, says Olori, was to have Vick actually be a strip-club employee who races people in the lot as a side hustle; Vick nixed the idea.)

There’s also a quick scene in which Darius and Paper Boi are gifted Harriet Tubman dollars—“before they [the government] stopped making them,” one character notes. It’s a subtle nod to the alternate universe of Atlanta—one where Tubman dollars really happened, one where Justin Bieber is black. Olori says that the show almost included a similar joke in Season 1 about Beyoncé being married to Nas instead of Jay-Z, in the world of Atlanta—but it ended up feeling “too pointed.” When the writing team heard that Tubman dollars were going to be made, though, they instantly decided to incorporate them into the show—largely because they don’t think the real world will ever end up printing any.

“It’s one of those things that’s gonna get slipped under the rug and everyone’s gonna forget about,” Olori predicts. “But . . . in our world, our Atlanta, it’s an alternate universe of sorts. You’ve got black Justin Bieber. It’s almost like one weird thing happened in space and time that completely changed everything, but a lot of things are still very similar. We wanted the Harriet Tubman dollar to exist in our world, and also to remind everybody like, yeah, that was supposed to happen! We wanted to create a spark on the Internet.”

Since the show’s writers also didn’t want to make any overt Donald Trump jokes, this was their way of getting in a subtle jab at his administration. Because, even though they can poke fun at pop-cultural figures (and viral-video moms), it ultimately doesn’t matter who becomes president in Atlanta’s Atlanta: “Nothing changes,” Olori says. “Earn is still super broke, Alfred still has to sell drugs, [and] Darius is just in his own world, period.”

Donald Glover Just Joined a Proud Golden Globes Tradition