Review: ‘Random Acts of Flyness’ Is a Striking Dream Vision of Race

HBO’s “Random Acts of Flyness” is like almost nothing you have seen on TV before. But it begins with a kind of image you have seen much too often.

Terence Nance, an artist and the show’s creator, is filming himself on his smartphone, cycling through New York City. A police officer pulls him over for “texting” while riding. Nance, who is black, tries to defuse the situation. The officer, who is white, is not having it. Things escalate. Things get violent.

This fictional scene recalls so many real-life viral videos, the camera jostling, the portrait-mode bars on the side of the screen pushing in suffocatingly. The deaths of Philando Castile and Walter Scott. White people calling the police on black people for using a coupon, wearing socks in a pool, selling water.

Part of the experience of race in 2018 is that people are able to document abuse and discrimination on video. Another part is that it happens again and again anyway. At what point does it all become some kind of horrific, surreal TV show?

This is one thing that Nance grapples with in the first hypnotic, transporting, uncategorizable half-hour of “Random Acts,” which airs Friday.

It is tempting to call the opening a “sketch,” but that would imply that the series is a late-night comedy. It is not, though it has a sense of humor. It is part video-art installation, part talk show, part dream anthology. It switches nimbly between documentary, animation, music and short film to try to capture a reality for which fiction and nonfiction alone are insufficient.

Probably the neatest category for the six-episode series is Afro-surrealism, a school of art and literature that represents black experience as a kind of waking half-hallucination. We have seen this, most recently, in the likes of “Atlanta,” “Get Out” and “Sorry to Bother You.” (Lakeith Stanfield, a common thread among all three, makes a brief appearance in the first episode.)

The first episode’s most unshakable segment is “Everybody Dies!,” a mock version of a cable-access children’s’ show, starring “Ripa the Reaper” (Tonya Pinkins).

Holding a costume-prop scythe, in front of a “murder map” of the U.S., Ripa ushers black children through a door marked “Death,” singing to the tune of “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star”: “You can squeal or whine or pray / Everybody dies one day.”

On paper, it may sound heavy-handed. On the screen, it is chilling and disorienting. Ripa becomes distressed, and the editing grows agitated. She tries to hurl herself through the death door only to re-emerge through one marked “Life.” Finally, she forces a smile, tears rolling down her face (an image also reminiscent of “Get Out”) and reprises her song. Reality has broken even Death.

The most conventionally sketch-like segment is an extended commercial parody with Jon Hamm for “White Be Gone,” a topical cream for the treatment of “white thoughts.”

That segment is also the one that most explicitly frames and addresses a white audience — Hamm, he is told, was chosen to reach viewers who trust his “beautiful beige face.” It ends with a text exchange between Nance and the assistant director Annalise Lockhart, who suggests that “as ARTISTS we should be addressing whiteness less … and affirming Blackness more.”

The first half-hour flows like this, fluid and self-interrogating. Nance appears in a short film — based, it says, on a real experience — about accidentally stepping into the wrong car after seeing a movie.

It might be a silly mix-up, except that the terrified woman who sees him in her car is white, and calls the police. “Although it is likely that you, friend, have found this turn of events humorous up until this point,” the narrator says, “I assure you, it is not.”

Over and over, a segment shifts tone abruptly, or a performer breaks character, as if the effort to maintain a persona is too great. The effect is to keep the viewer off-balance, in a tenuous reality, where you — like the victims of violence the show references — could blink from ordinary slice-of-life existence into a horror story.

This is part of what it means to say that a story feels like a nightmare: the sense that you are not in control of your own narrative.

But “Random Acts” is more than an unsettling dream. There is a talk segment on bisexuality and the black community, which shifts into a stop-motion animated vignette; there is an entrancing music video from the experimental musician Norvis Junior.

The throughline is Nance himself, whether as a deadpan presence on-screen or a curious, playful force off-screen, aiming to keep viewers conscious of what they are seeing.

This culminates in a video essay on the word “blackface,” repeated deliberately (“Black. Face.”) over portrait shots of black subjects, young and old, male and female, until it is cut by pictures of white people in dark makeup, with the narration: “Not blackface.”

All this suggests that “Random Acts of Flyness” is not simply out to provoke or shock. Rather, it is trying to disrupt and redisrupt your perceptions so that, finally, you can see.