Rich Wigga, Poor Wigga

In April 2022, FX announced that the ninth episode of the season would be titled "Rich Wigga, Poor Wigga" and that it would be written and directed by series creator and main actor Donald Glover. This was Glover's eighth writing credit, and his sixth directing credit.[1]

Kevin Samuels guest stars in the episode.

The episode features an appearance by Kevin Samuels as Robert S. Lee, a millionaire alumnus. The episode aired one week after Samuels died on May 5, 2022.[2] Stephen Glover commented on casting Samuels despite the actor facing some controversial remarks, "I'm a Black man, so to me, Kevin Samuels isn't that crazy. He was an old Black man. I think we've all met some version of Kevin Samuels before in our lives. We probably have a family member who's Kevin Samuels."[3] The role was originally offered to Steve Harvey but when the idea fell through, the crew settled on giving the role to Samuels.[3]

The episode was watched by 0.225 million viewers, earning a 0.1 in the 18-49 rating demographics on the Nielson ratings scale. This means that 0.1 percent of all households with televisions watched the episode.[4] This was a 27% decrease from the previous episode, which was watched by 0.305 million viewers with a 0.1 in the 18-49 demographics.[5]

"Rich Wigga, Poor Wigga" received negative reviews from critics. The review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes reported a 75% approval rating for the episode, based on 8 reviews with an average rating of 5.5/10.[6]

Michael Martin of The A.V. Club gave the episode a "B" and writing, "A few scenes here rank among the series' most satirically sharp, but the episode foils itself a bit. We've come to expect more from the show than broad satirical strokes, even from the anthological characters. And that's the disadvantage of these standalone episodes — you need to imbue your characters with complete life from scratch for the episode to work; there's no history to fall back on. In other anthological episodes this season, Atlanta has done it artfully, but here, it creates a character that's too complicated for the script."[7]

Alan Sepinwall of Rolling Stone wrote, "If Glover wanted to go full anthology with a new project — to succeed where Jordan Peele mostly didn't with his 2019 Twilight Zone revival — he has more than earned that right. But it is getting harder with each Season Three digression to avoid wishing that we were back in the familiar company of Al, Darius, Earn, and/or Van, regardless of how strange the individual circumstances may be. Let Atlanta be Atlanta, no matter where a season may be set."[8]

Jordan Taliha McDonald of Vulture gave the episode a 2 star rating out of 5 and wrote, "I... see this episode as a crucial sample of the show's marrow, and the results show that provocation is the cancer in the lifeblood of the series."[9] Lex Pryor of The Ringer wrote, "The thing that most sticks out at this stage in the season is: Does it even matter? In an age when film and television worship the idols of plot, interconnectivity, and theory, does Atlanta have to have a point beyond whatever was last on screen? Do we need to know the exact states of Van's or Darius's headspaces? Or if Al and Earn can balance creative ambition and financial stability (or a lack thereof)? The show was gone for four years. A lot has changed. That it took this form in its return seems to be an argument in and of itself. If the penultimate episode is any indication, the message is that there's no right way to do this, that everything's context dependent. In 'Rich Wigga, Poor Wigga', as seems to be the new normal on Atlanta, race is fickle and right is an abstraction."[10]

Deshawn Thomas of /Film wrote, "It just makes no sense that, four years after season 2, we've hardly seen the Black characters we've come to love. The show has morphed into a half-assed attempt at an anthology about white privilege that doesn't even have the balls to really go there because it continues and has dedicated four episodes in a 10-episode season to showcasing white actors and white perspectives. Forgive me if I don't f*** with it anymore because it feels like a convoluted minstrel show at this point, and so the praise it is receiving for being "deep" is nauseating and laughable."[11] Kyndall Cunningham of The Daily Beast was also critical, writing "With all the ideas this episode tries to tackle and muddles in the process, it seems like a standard episode of Atlanta featuring the show's cast might have been a safer bet. But fans, like myself, may just have to accept that this show is a run-of-the-mill anthology series about racism now and buckle in for the next season, or simply not watch it at all."[12]