Openly seeking to overcome stasis, Random Acts plays out in dreamlike sequences, cutting from segment to segment, from documentary to claymation to bilingual musical, oscillating between dark farce and fantasia. The ever-shifting tropes destabilize the viewer; there’s no enlightenment to be mined from comfort alone. The series is not so much a dive into the mind of black identity as much as it is an exodus out of the mind, dissonant and connected vignettes rendering the internal external, and in the process deciphering what Nance describes in the show’s introduction as the “beauty and ugliness of contemporary American life.” They are experiences and encounters granted the same deft elasticity we face in our daily lives—and to see them on screen can at times feel like a revelation, even if the poetry is not instantly clear.

Episode 2, which airs tomorrow, flickers with less physical violence and existential burden, honing its focus instead on the mutations, projections and outcomes of our gendered existences, inverting the image of rigged masculinity into a fluid and tender thing. One of the episode’s most affecting scenes, which slinks with the discursive whimsy of a hood fairy tale, unfolds from the streets of New York City, following a young boy as he chases a shadow, into the heat of a swarming apartment where he affectionately tussles with another boy, and later finds himself in a flowered wonderland. It’s a musical about homophobia in Latin culture with flourishes of Peter Pan. But it's also a meditation on love—love in action and intent, love that does not need to correlate with desire or lust, love that has fled the claws of heteronormative life.

The series is not so much a dive into the mind of black identity as much as it is an exodus out of the mind, deciphering what Nance describes in the show’s introduction as the “beauty and ugliness of contemporary American life.”

Nance has an appreciation for atmosphere and collage, stitching together people, ideologies, Afrosurrealism, and metafiction into a rhapsodic distillation of art. It’s hard not to suspect that he and his collaborators—four or five directors are credited in each episode—would be just as daring if the show was not on HBO. These are artists who thrive on voyages into, and out of, the self.

The series has already drawn comparisons to Atlanta, but, really, it’s only resemblance to that or other “elevated black shit” (as Jordan Peele once categorized the genre to which Glover’s FX hit belongs) is its insistence on unpeeling its humanness, the endless layers of trauma and racism and microaggressions black people routinely bump up against. The difference is, Atlanta doesn’t care if viewers recognize its strata; Random Acts gives the feeling that it wants viewers to be conscious of how intricate the labyrinth is. If the show does have an antecedent for its succulent totality, it’s George C. Wolfe’s 1986 masterwork The Colored Museum, which humorously and sometimes gravely engaged the rainbow of identities, and the psychological warfare waged within those identities, that constitute black life.

So, what can a more liberated vision of TV look like? It can look like Random Acts of Flyness, a show without a destination that finds joy instead in the rigor of exploration. At the end of one segment, in which Jon Hamm advertises topical cream that rids “victims of whiteness” of casually racist thoughts, a note from the show’s assistant director appears on Nance’s computer screen, where he is editing the clip we’ve just watched. “It seems to me that as ARTISTS we should be addressing whiteness less,” she writes, “and affirming Blackness more.” The message is unblinking in its urgency to unhook whiteness from work by black creators, but it also reads as a mission statement of sorts. How Nance and his collaborators will continue to go about affirming blackness, in all its brilliant ambiguity, is half the fun of tuning in.

(Disclosure: Nance and I have met in the past, and share a number of mutual friends.)

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