![]() The video on the phone is an old TV interview of iconic author/playwright Lorraine Hansberry. They talk calmly about their open polyamorous relationship after he settles into bed, only to be interrupted by audio from the phone she was just holding while rubbing one out. – Terence comes home late to find his lover masturbating with a sizable massager. The black kids don’t get treats, only a harried shove through the door marked “Death.” The host, an emotionally strained black woman named Ripa the Reaper, tells them that they’re in the wrong place and they need to go down the hall to a room where there are cookies. ![]() ![]() – During a public-access cable show called “Everybody Dies,” a white boy and girl wander into the waiting room between life and death, along with a group of black kids. Put it to you this way: Imagine the irradiated stepchild of In Living Color, Parliament-Funkadelic’s whole vibe, Fishbone LPs, rap videos from the 1990s and every black student union conversation that ever happened at an HBCU and a PWI from 2004 to the present-day. There are comedic contributions that morph into body horror, confessionals from people throwing off binary gender norms, chimerical microdramas built around a recurring theme, singing, dancing, screaming and video games. The whole enterprise is a mutant organism that defies categorization, one that revels in non-standard composition every episode plays with chronology, jumping back and forth through time, looping in on itself recursively in the way that memory does. It’s tricky to describe what happens in an average installment of Flyness - other than “a mechanism to deliver one man’s idea of what sheer unadulterated blackness can look and feel like” - because nothing about it is average. When it comes to a complete and total lack of fucks, nothing else on television can compete with it. You wonder if some hapless HBO executive got tricked into paying for what feels like a mass-hallucination experiment. Assembled through a collage of screenwriting, opinion, analysis and rage, it’s a 30-minute collection of snapshots that show the multifaceted realities of being a black person in the America of 2018. But the new HBO series from Terence Nance isn’t like anything else on the small screen - or any screen, really - right now, or recently, or possibly ever. At first glance, Random Acts of Flyness might sound like something you’ve seen before: a block of programming where a stable of actors run through sketches, intercut with musical performances and acerbic takes on the issues of the day.
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