Donald Glover: Hollywood’s Biggest Fraud

Henry Serano

November 19, 2025

Part 1: Intro + Early Career

If you’ve paid attention to pop culture in the past decade, you likely know the name Donald Glover. In fact, it’s likely that you have a positive opinion of him. Today, I’d like to illustrate to you the way he has manipulated the public into believing that he is talented, and how much of his identity is fabricated.
As many of you know. Donald is considered a modern-day renaissance man. He’s an actor, a screenwriter, a musician, and even a stand-up comedian. Originally, though, he started his career as a screenwriter on 30 Rock. With mild success there, Glover was able to get his big break on the NBC sitcom Community.
Now, I think, is the best time to explain myself. It seems that he was a good enough writer on 30 Rock, and his role as Troy on Community is iconic. Why don’t I like Donald Glover? My answer is simple. He isn’t talented. Rather, he surrounds himself with talented people, to give the illusion that he is the cause of his success. His strongest quality in the entertainment industry is his ability to consistently find people who can propel him to success, all the while maintaining the guise of his own talent.
In his acting career, we’ve already discussed him with the likes of Tina Fey and Dan Harmon, two hugely successful showrunners of the sitcoms 30 Rock and Community respectively, but these are much less egregious than what he has done with his later career. After all, he didn’t choose for Harmon or Fey to create the shows, he just happened to be in the right place at the right time. However, the same can’t be said for his later career.

Part 2: Atlanta

Atlanta is what most consider to be the pinnacle of Glover’s writing and acting career. He has created other shows since then, such as Swarm and Mr. & Mrs. Smith, but none have received the critical acclaim that Atlanta has had. It’s surrealist, self-contained story structure was extremely well executed and well written. That’s because Glover neither wrote or directed any of its highlights. Writers like Francesca Sloane, Ibra Ake, and Stephen Glover, Donald’s brother, consistently write all of the shows highest-rated episodes, such as North of the Border, Champagne Papi, and Barbershop. As the show went on, Donald wrote less and less, and by the final season, Donald only wrote one episode of the 10-episode season. And as for directing, it’s even worse.

Let me introduce you to Hiro Murai. He is a Japanese filmmaker and director who is behind smash hits such as The Bear, Station Eleven, and, coincidentally, nearly every film, show, and music video that Glover is in. This includes 26 of the 41 episodes of Atlanta, Mr. & Mrs. Smith, Legion, and every Childish Gambino music video, including the famous This is America video. Donald Glover, in his career, has been in a whopping ELEVEN Hiro Murai projects.
The following is a comprehensive list of every project that Donald has been involved with, excluding Hiro Murai directed projects.

NOTE: His roles in both The Martian and Spider-Man: Homecoming are small cameos with less than 10 minutes of screentime.

Part 3: Childish Gambino

Of course, you can’t talk about Donald Glover without talking about his alter ego, Childish Gambino. Glover gets a lot of credit as both an actor and a musician because of his status as a man of many talents, but I think this is a dishonest way of looking at it. His career as a musician exists because of his career as an actor, and it echoes his acting career too. That is to say that he has one person to thank for his success, and it isn’t himself. On the set of community, Glover met Ludwig Göransson, an accomplished composer for projects such as Tenet, The Mandalorian, and Oppenheimer, before he had achieved his status as a top film composer. From that point onward, the two have collaborated on every Childish Gambino album, with Göransson being the lead producer. For his most critically acclaimed album, “Awaken, My Love!” he has writing credits on every song. With that said, though, his musical career is still impressive, even if much of it is thanks to his extremely talented producer.

Pictured: Ludwig Göransson and Donald Glover holding hands.

Part 4: He is Insufferable

Although he is a widely popular celebrity, he isn’t free of his fair share of controversies. Without going into too much detail, there have been numerous think pieces and articles published about his representation of black women in his shows, particularly in his Amazon Prime series, Swarm, in which he encouraged Dominique Fishback to “think of [the role] more like an animal and less like a person.” Coincidentally, Swarm is Glover’s only series he has created without the partnership of Hiro Murai. Along with this, he has spoken out on multiple occasions about “Cancel Culture” in the entertainment industry. In his words, “We’re getting boring stuff and not even experimental mistakes(?) because people are afraid of getting cancelled.” Ultimately, this is his personal opinion, so he can believe what he wants to believe, but this talking point has no basis in reality (many experimental films and series have been released recently, including Glover’s own projects), and it’s a common talking point among creatively bankrupt entertainers.
Finally, Glover’s most prominent controversy is his bizarre and obsessive fixation with Asian women. In many of his lyrics throughout his career, he has referenced Asian women in a fetishistic way. This is not uncommon on its own, but the degree to which Glover does this is extremely exceptional. It’s hard to put into words just how many of Glover’s lyrics are about Asian women, especially on his EP, Camp, so I’ve included a graph detailing the amount of lyrics about Asian women in each of his albums.