“We should be addressing whiteness less, and affirming blackness more”:Random Acts of Flyness, Afrosurrealism, and Quality Programming

Abstract

Premiering on Saturday nights in summer of 2018, the barely-promoted Random Acts of Flyness (RAOF) was buried in HBO’s schedule. The highly experimental series combines many forms, including late night talk show, documentary, claymation, and sketch show, amongst many others. With stylistic techniques such as Afrosurrealism and self-reflexivity alongside discursive tools that heighten the series’ claim to “quality,” I argue that RAOF utilizes its surreal and distinctly black creative production to critically examine representations of blackness and whiteness in the media and American culture. I further contend that, for HBO, independent filmmaker and series creator Terence Nance’s pedigree fits the channel’s long-standing association with “higher” art forms, even as the series does not fit into historically white and affluent notions of “quality.” As the television landscape becomes broader and markers of “quality” become harder to pin down, the series’ incisive look at blackness proves to be an exceptional case study.

‘Are we having fun yet?’: The Starz television network and Party Down as indie TV

“…Jessica Ford used the phrase ‘women’s indie television’ to describe ‘a new cycle of women-centric dramedies in conversation with indie cinema, quality television and popular media feminisms’ (2019: 928), including Girls (2012-2017), Insecure (2016-2021), and Better Things (2016-2022). Forthun (2019) demonstrated how Terrence Nance’s experimental Afrosurrealist Random Acts of Flyness (2018-present), produced by A24, blurred the promotional link between film and television in its foregrounding of Nance as a singular Black indie creative. 2 Broader still, the collection Indie TV: Industry, Aesthetics and Medium Specificity (Lyons and Tzioumakis, 2023) makes the case for understanding indie TV with reference to a much more complex history of aesthetic, industrial and institutional trends and traditions.…”

An Ode to Black British Girls

“…Over the last five years Black American film and television writers, like Boots Riley, Terence Nance, and Donald Glover, have employed Afro-surrealism as a cultural aesthetic in their projects to call attention to the absurdity of racism and racial capitalism in society primarily through satire, horror, and portraying black life as something wholly disturbing. 31 The cultural aesthetic has its roots in the Négritude Movement and work of artists, like Aimé Césaire, a Martinique-born poet, who drew on the French language and surrealism to critique life under colonialism. Césaire's surrealist imagination marked Discourse on Colonialism, a long form poem/essay that vividly articulated the impact of colonization on the colonized.…”