Donald Glover as Earn Marks in "Atlanta," a mesmerizing tale of a young man adrift in a hardscrabble Georgia suburb. FX's "Atlanta" - magnificently conceived by and starring Donald Glover - doesn't begin so much as it simply happens, opening with a confrontation in a convenience-store parking lot and immediately shifting to morning light, where Glover, as Earnest "Earn" Marks, wakes from a dream next to Van , the mother of his baby daughter, Lottie.