If you happen to come across HBO’s new late-night variety show Random Acts of Flyness, you’ll find yourself wondering, probably within the first several minutes, just whose brainchild it is. The show opens with a semi-scripted encounter between a cop and a black man riding his bike; minutes later, Jon Hamm appears in an informercial for “White Be Gone”, a goopy elixir promising to heal those who “suffer from white thoughts”. There’s a claymation vignette that follows a bisexual black man in New York; a talkshow segment unpacking the “sexual proclivities of the black community”; and a short called Everybody Dies, featuring similarly dour maxims sung to the tune of Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star. It’s futuristic and retro, clear-eyed but utterly unclassifiable. It is, for lack of a better word or genre, Terence Nance.

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An artist, film-maker, and occasional musician, Nance is often reflexively labeled with catch-all terms: eclectic, experimental, non-linear, avant-garde. In their sheer aesthetic variance, his films are all of those things. But Random Acts of Flyness, Nance’s new weekly, half-hour program with HBO, exposes our collective vernacular gap when it comes to describing work, particularly by artists of color, that’s unmoored from cinematic convention. Random Acts can be silly, like Drunk History or Tim & Eric, and then fiercely political; angry, and then celebratory; sarcastic, then dead serious. But Nance, who after several shorts and one acclaimed feature has come to acquire a kind of indie-auteur status, wasn’t worried the show’s strangeness would prevent it from finding a home in today’s engorged television landscape.

“My understanding of HBO’s palette is that they’re interested in stuff that’s different from what they already have,” says the 36-year-old, who lives in Brooklyn. “If they have something for the people who watch Entourage, they’re not going to do something else with lots of people walking around Hollywood talking to each other on phones. Knowing that they wanted to keep people guessing, that this is one of the few places where I’ll be able to do what I do and do it well, gave me a lot of confidence.”

Confident might be the best way to characterize Nance’s vision, through which the black experience is rendered in kaleidoscopic but refined detail. That comes, in part, from his early exposure to black cinema and theater. As a child Nance spent time watching his mother, an actor and acting coach, rehearse August Wilson plays, from which he learned how to tell “when acting is really bad”. By the time he was seven, he’d seen Do The Right Thing, To Sleep with Anger and Daughters of the Dust in theaters. Nance’s father, a local news cameraman and “music aesthete”, frequently photographed him and his siblings, rounding out a household that entertained most conceivable artistic disciplines.

“He wasn’t the type to say, ‘Oh, what’s that noisy hip-hop?’” says Nance of his father. “He’d buy it and try to break it down. He wasn’t a DJ, but he was a curator with music. That kind of eclecticism is part and parcel to what I’m doing every day.”

On Random Acts of Flyness, however, Nance was more directly influenced by his own work and that of his close friends and collaborators, many of whom appear in the show or helped write and direct it. The Ghanaian film-maker Frances Bodomo directed four episodes; the “tonality”, Nance says, of her short sci-fi film Afronauts (about the Zambian space program in the 1960s) is reflected in his own taste for the surreal. The sculptor Doreen Garner, another member of what Nance calls his “insular, in-community”, appears as Aunteee Doreeny in the talkshow segment, in which the two discuss “the invisibility of the bisexual black man”.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Garner and Nance in the premiere episode of Random Acts of Flyness. Photograph: HBO

“Terence definitely sees the world through different eyes,” says Garner. “He approaches film more like a sculpture. Some of the shots, some of the lighting, are things I wouldn’t imagine myself being able to manifest.”

Another collaborator is Nance’s own brother, Nelson Mandela Nance, an electronic musician who goes by Norvis Jr. At the end of the premiere episode of Random Acts, Norvis appears in Music in the Mountains, an impressionistic performance piece that calls to mind the brothers’ 2015 short film Swimming in Your Skin Again.

Swimming – Nance’s follow-up to his 2012 debut feature An Oversimplification of Her Beauty, an inventive and interstitial take on the mechanics of love and courtship – opens with something of an artist’s statement, or at least a parody of one. “This film is sound and images juxtaposed and means nothing,” says the voiceover in its opening credits, a riff, Nance says, on the tedious legalese in contractual disclaimers. When we speak, a day before the premiere of Random Acts, I ask Nance if he’d like viewers to approach his new show similarly, refraining from the fool’s errand of presuming an artist’s intent.

“That’s a process I don’t participate in,” he says. “I don’t think any artist is really participating in making meaning. Meaning is rarely prescriptive. We’re in the process of making the thing and making meaning is what happens in the collective consciousness after you’re already at home, asleep. The beautiful thing about it is it doesn’t even matter if I said it means nothing. It’s just something that I said.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest ‘He approaches film more like a sculpture,’ says Doreen Garner of Nance. Photograph: Jaimie Milner/HBO

If Nance doesn’t traffic in suggesting, or even anticipating, audience reactions to Random Acts, one moment in the pilot can be read as an authorial wink. After the “White Be Gone” segment, which advertises a cure for “acute viral perceptive albinitis”, Nance is shown texting with his assistant director, Annalise Lockhart, who suggests they should be “addressing whiteness less” and “affirming blackness more”. The episode proceeds accordingly, exchanging parody for earnestness.

“It’s a move away from whiteness, but it’s also away from a stereotype of media experience of trauma and pain,” he says of the mid-episode shift. “I think that mirrors something that every black person does every day: turning away from bullshit, you know what I mean? Closing one set of eyes and opening another set of eyes. Taking your armor off so you can hug your child. It’s a process that’s sometimes physical, sometimes psychological, sometimes spiritual. That allegorical shift in the pilot is the same as that daily shift that all black people have to do.

“One thing I was thinking,” Nance adds, “is how do we celebrate, not satirize?” While the show was in the early stages of development, he characterized Random Acts to the website Film Comment as a response to “how ineffectual political satire is on television”. Amid the boatload of ideas Nance explores in the show, that eventually took a back seat. But he remains intrigued by the relationship between politics and satire, specifically the “instinct to satirize as a coping mechanism”.

After Random Acts of Flyness, says Garner, the sculptor, “television is never going to be the same”. It’s a high bar to clear, but Garner, who says Nance’s work can “help people understand blackness in a different way”, isn’t the only person who expects the show and its creator to break ground. Nance, discussing his unconventional work with the cool, shrewd temperament of an industry veteran, clearly expects as much from himself. So far, he’s watched the first episodes with small, mostly all-black audiences peopled by friends and contemporaries. Beyond that, though, he’s along for the ride, just the like rest of us.

“I don’t know how people in Denmark are going to respond to it, how people who go to church every day are going to respond to it,” he says. “I’m just curious.”