Horror Bottles: Atlanta’s Famous “Teddy Perkins”
FX/Guy D'Alema
I was determined to have a good night. I played with my dog for the entirety of my pump-up playlist so he’d calm down enough to sleep beside me with the night’s scary movie. Trader Joe’s mochi in hand, I was ready. This would be good.
And nothing. The movie was shocking, sure, but I felt so disconnected from it. I couldn’t find the film’s heart.
Dejected, confused, I emerged the next morning into commotion downtown. Everyone came out of Wilmington’s woodwork for the annual Azalea Festival. Elderly people strode through the neighborhood in jaunty hats to go on home tours. My dog spent the day a nervous wreck—scared by motorcycles and rowdy parade-goers in the morning and fireworks at night. Avoiding the festivities, I ended up outside of the sun and at my friend Jon’s house for some TV.
Atlanta follows a group of friends in the eponymous city, and in its second season the show mostly eschews conventional plot in favor of the bottle episode, self-contained stories. “Teddy Perkins” opens with Darius (LaKeith Stanfield), the show’s fashion icon and more soft-spoken, sunny male lead, at a hardware store, asking the cashier if they have dried mango. Instead, his eyes alight on a Confederate flag hat declaring, “Southern Made.” He buys it, along with a red sharpie, transforming the message to “U Mad.”
Listening to Stevie Wonder, Darius drives out of the city in a U-Haul, arriving at a forbidding, stately home seemingly in the middle of nowhere. It’s a bright day. When he goes to knock on the door, it opens. He steps inside a house so dark and old you can smell the dust in the air. Then, Teddy appears out of the shadows, the high pitch of his voice whistling through the dark. Darius has come to pick up a free piano with colored keys he found on a message board. With the air of a gothic, Teddy invites Darius inside. What will happen when Darius enters this home?
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The Ringer ranked the twenty best bottle episodes of all time, and “Teddy Perkins” clocked in at number two. So what is a bottle episode? “Once a way for network shows to up their episode counts without spending a ton of money, the bottle episode is now a way for shows to distill their meaning, focus on their most important characters, and flex their creative muscles.” One of the famous first examples comes from Seinfeld, “The Chinese Restaurant,” ranking fourth. The entire episode takes place while Jerry, Elaine, and George wait for a table at a Chinese restaurant. The form rattled NBC execs who thought it would tank, but they let them try anyway. It was a massive success and spurred on the bottle as we know it today.
Bottle episodes are like, well, putting one of the show’s characters in a bottle. The writer in me thinks if the series is the novel, bottle episodes are the perfect short stories. They envision alternate worlds for a moment, oftentimes without becoming encumbered by the show’s main plotlines. In Girls, “One Man’s Trash,” (ranked #11) blew me away in its tender love story, inhabiting an alternate, dreamy world for just one weekend. Bottle episodes can also animate a character’s emotional weather more fully. In The Leftovers, “International Assassin” (ranked #14) tracks Kevin Garvey through a magical dream sequence, and the air, the rules of engagement have changed, emanating from the contours of Kevin’s mind.
Notable about The Ringer’s rankings is that each show could only rank once. Otherwise, Atlanta would have swept the rankings. The show is a masterclass in the bottle episode; almost every episode functions as one, assembling a collage of experience within the season. In season 2, reality careens into the surreal. Jon, who’s up to date and watching season three, says how the show is so bold in its tonal dissonance. Prior to “Teddy Perkins” is a bottle episode in which Alfred tries to get a haircut. The next episode follows Van, attending a New Year’s Eve party at Drake’s house. There’s a careful whiplash to the show, always asking the viewer to embrace the slippage of our reality, to see its different contours.
“Teddy Perkins” is Darius’s first bottle. Immediately, I was enthralled. What does it feel like to more deeply inhabit his world?
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Teddy and Darius move through the home, trekking deeper inside Teddy’s mind and history. Teddy’s brother, Benny Hope, has a rare skin condition, making him sensitive to the sun, thus the darkness of the home. Also, Benny was a famous pianist, rubbing elbows with the likes of Al Jarreau, Stevie Wonder, and Keith Jarrett. Teddy’s in the process of making the home into a historic site, a museum for their family’s story, the greatness they achieved.
Yet, all is not well within the home. When Teddy shows Darius into the living room, he invites him to eat a soft-boiled ostrich egg. Darius declines. Teddy procures a tiny hammer and whacks it open, then shaves off the top and dips his fingers right in. Darius covers his nose with his fingers, instinctively.
The episode brims over with horror tropes, evoked in such bizarre, striking ways that we not only feel the texture of Teddy’s world, but also see the tropes anew. Darius steps outside to call Alfred, and Teddy is a creepy face, watching and waving in the window. Darius loads the piano into the elevator and the buttons are unresponsive, bringing him instead to the basement, where Benny is hidden away. The episode raises the question whether Teddy and Benny are even real: Darius suspects Benny might have invented Teddy because he made himself so “ghoulish” with skin whitening. Throughout the episode, we revisit concepts we’ve seen before—the gothic house, the spooky double—and instead of feeling tired and predictable, the mind sees them, is disoriented, and has to ask why. Perhaps most emblematic of the episode’s unease is that Teddy is actually played by Stanfield’s co-star, Donald Glover, in heavy makeup and prosthetics, but Glover remained in character on set, and Stanfield didn’t know.
At the home’s dark heart, we learn about dad troubles. Teddy’s favorite room in the home is a hall that will honor his father. Their father beat them and made them practice every day. Teddy believes that to make an omelet, you have to break a few eggs. Darius’s visit interrogates Teddy’s attitudes on success and sacrifice, and it asks Darius to reflect on his own past.
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When we finished watching, I might have screamed. The imagination, the writing, and the cinematography (for which the episode won an Emmy) all so complex, I zipped home, bypassing the festival outside, and read more about the episode, its creation, all of its references and potential interpretations. Watching it again, I sank deeper and deeper into the space of Teddy’s world. And this is only thirty-five minutes of television.
Obviously, a bottle episode isn’t a short story. It’s more that season one of Atlanta is the novel and season two is a story cycle sequel. They can speak to each other, casting lights back and forth. “Teddy Perkins” overflows with heart, depth, and intrigue, and even in this series, with Darius as one of the mainstays, I had to ask, “Will he get out okay?” He leaves the house, and the show moves on, to Drake, to other things. And even if the world continues, this quest for a curious piano just an odd memory they don’t discuss, we’ll still remember all Darius learned.
