“Random Acts of Flyness” begins with the show’s host, Terence Nance, an affable goofball with a blown-dandelion Afro and a tooth gap, biking through Brooklyn. “What up, world!” he says, shooting video of himself. The iPhone view suggests a super-casual project—maybe a friend’s Kickstarter—with race-themed sketches, which Nance begins to list: there will be “a whole bunch of flyness for you today,” he assures us, such as some “blackface, that’s always dope,” a short film, and something on “the sexual proclivities of the black community.”

Immediately, however, glitches appear: the word “motherfucking” gets bleeped, even though we’re watching HBO. There are rainbow flares; Snapchat animal masks drifting up; mysterious bursts of applause. It’s odd. Then a cop car arrives, sirens blaring. Nance gets knocked over. When the camera and the bike tip, we go straight down a rabbit hole—horizontal events squashed into a vertical frame—into Facebook Live’s nightmare genre: an encounter between a black person and the cops. It’s spontaneous documentary footage, evidence of trauma that will itself become trauma, after it goes viral.

This skittering from one mood (and one mode) to another is the show’s guiding principle. In the final scenes of the pilot, Nance is floating high above the earth, like a combination of the Road Runner and Kendrick Lamar in “Alright.” He’s still narrating—a survivor who has slipped past both the cops and the plot.

Even two episodes in, it’s clear that “Random Acts of Flyness”—a collaboration between Nance and a group of his friends, black artists working out of Bed-Stuy, who include Jamund Washington, Naima Ramos-Chapman, and Mariama Diallo—is one of the funkier, wilder projects of the year. The show is an avant-garde trip that feels drenched with sincerity. It’s imperfect by design and unafraid to risk seeming corny or pretentious (and, once in a while, it tilts). It’s also part of a culture-transforming burst of African-American creativity—including movies like “Moonlight,” “Get Out,” and “Sorry to Bother You,” as well as TV shows like Issa Rae’s “Insecure,” on HBO, and Justin Simien’s “Dear White People,” on Netflix—that examines, often through experimental means, black male vulnerability. These projects share a desire to show African-American men with their emotional walls down, yearning or bruised, at risk from systems that see their bodies only as fuel or as fantasy.

Nance—whose independent film “An Oversimplification of Her Beauty,” about a girl who got away, was as emo as it gets—queers that concept and adds glitter. The first episode includes an interview with a bisexual black man, whose date with a woman is acted out in Claymation; the second is dominated by a dream musical about Peter Pan, punctuated by montages of male handshakes and hugs. Straight men are just one shard in the kaleidoscope. This distaste for binaries—this insistence on poly-ness, multiplicity, lots of options—extends to the format as well. In Slate, the poet Maya Phillips described Afro-Surrealism, the movement named by Amiri Baraka, as a dream-logic approach to black experience that transcends genre, and Nance eagerly extends this idea to memes and talk shows, documentaries and video games, often pulling back to let one medium frame the other. (Toward the end of a caustic infomercial for “White Thoughts,” a friend’s iMessage pops up to critique it as focussing too much on white people. “You right,” Nance concedes, and the sketch ends.) The pacing is manic, as on Adult Swim, but “Random Acts” is more hippie-dippie and D.I.Y.: we’re constantly alerted to the stitching, the fingerprints in the clay, the weirdo interpolations that leak through the cracks. You get the feeling that if Nance could edit smells into the show he would.

It’s downright amazing that “Random Acts” is on television in the first place—and the show seems to get that, frequently invoking the medium’s uncanny qualities. One segment features a supremely bizarre kiddie show: “EVERYBODY DIES, your portal to the afterlife, Thursdays at 8:30 a.m., 7:30 Central.” In it, the host, Ripa the Reaper, ushers black kids to their deaths, playing limbo with her scythe. The aesthetic is tawdry, like seventies public access; but the true horror is that Ripa, too, can’t escape this ugly spectacle. “You might be running from the police,” she says—then tugs out her earphone, and begins to chant, “You might be running from a stranger who thinks he’s the police. You might be playing with a toy gun. You might be not selling cigarettes.” A familiar message blots out the screen: “Please Stand By We Are Experiencing Technical Difficulties.”

“Random Acts of Flyness”—whose name, appropriately, puns on phrases incorporating “kindness” and “violence”—is full of sketches like this, which magnify and bend the pain of modern tragedies. But, for all its clear interest in white-supremacist threat, “Random Acts” is not a gloomy or heavy show. It’s liberated and raw, eager to bridge the gap between the ugly and the beautiful. And, like “Monty Python” in its day, it lets a lot of energy linger in the interstices: animated hands pull on a sheep’s hooves, then a wolf’s paws; a glittering whirl evolves into the words “HAVE YOU / EVER HAD / A THOUGHT that / YOU / WISH / YOU COULD / UN-HAVE?” Making sense is not a priority. What is the meaning of that bright-pink twerking ass, studded with painted-on eyeballs, like some outtake from “Laugh-In”? Does it help that there’s a glowing rainbow right behind it?

TV can’t help but respond to other television—for its entire history, it’s been an imitative, self-conscious medium. A few years back, I had the distinct sensation that CBS’s “The Good Wife” was speeding up its plot in response to ABC’s “Scandal,” and that “Scandal” was becoming blunter about race in response to Fox’s “Empire.” For too long, there were so few television shows with black creators that each got siloed as “the black show,” a pressure that benefits no art. This year feels like a meaningful inflection point. Shonda Rhimes is leaving ABC for the freedom of Netflix, and Kenya Barris is rumored to be doing the same; on FX, “Atlanta” and “Pose” are thriving with two very different visions of both blackness and television. There are finally so many formal experiments that some can succeed, some fail, some get frankly weird—and viewers still have faith that this boom won’t recede.

Under these conditions, black TV feels less like a message and more like a conversation. One of the best episodes of “Atlanta” was a simultaneously scathing and affectionate roast of BET. Barris’s “black-ish” mimicked and interrogated both “Good Times” and “The Cosby Show.” On this season of “Insecure,” Issa Rae’s character, Issa, watches a reboot of a nineties-style comedy called “KEV’YN,” in which characters wear shirts that say “Black Wives Matter.” It’s a laugh-track sitcom whose tone doesn’t even mildly resemble the moody L.A.-aspirational cable vibe of “Insecure,” but Issa is swamped with memories: “L’il Chris, forty-five years old, still hiding in cabinets!” she says, smiling, revelling in nostalgia for these blunter, ruder network comedy beats.

Scenes like this are not just black-made parodies of black TV; they’re representations of the black audience, talking back. The excellent “Dear White People” is a show with cinema-snob appeal. (It’s also the rare Netflix series whose seasons are the right length.) But its college students don’t stick to art films; they gather to whoop at warped versions of “Scandal,” “Empire,” and “Love & Hip Hop.” “When I got here, these shows were my only frame of reference for black Americans,” says Rashid, an African exchange student. “I was terrified.” “Terrified of black people or that you’d be seen as one?” his friend asks, skeptically. “Both!” he says. “This country is a mind-fuck.”

Wait till Rashid catches “Random Acts of Flyness.” The slogan of the show is “Shift consciousness,” which is another way to say, “Change the channel.” Some people might do just that. But there is something to be said for TV as Etch A Sketch: just shake and try again. ♦

An earlier version of this article gave an incorrect title for one of Nance’s films.