SKETCH ARTIST

‘Random Acts of Flyness’ takes a very dreamy trip to late-night’s avant-garde side

By LAUREN SARNER W RITER/filmmaker Terence Nance’s new HBO show is almost impossible to describe — so he had to pitch it in an unusual way.

His executive producer, Tamir Muhammad, provided funding for Nance to make half the pilot — so instead of showing HBO a script or a concept, he went straight to showing footage to HBO programming execs.

“It was easier just to show [HBO] what we wanted to do than to pitch it verbally,” says Nance, 36. “You can’t use the descriptors that people are used to using. You can’t come in and say ‘I’m making a single-camera family dramedy.’ ” Nance’s weekly show, “Random Acts of Flyness,” premieres Friday at midnight. The sixepisode half-hour series is comprised of dream-like, avantgarde vignettes and sketches.

“I kind of configured the show as not having a format,” says Nance. “It has episodes, but there isn’t a goal from our perspective in terms of how the experience should be structured — so it’s kind of post-form.”

In the first episode, one harrowing vignette involves a police officer aggressively apprehending Nance. Another sketch features a claymation depiction of a bad date. A third features Jon Hamm (“Mad Men”) directly addressing the camera.

“As we were making the show, we just tried to embrace the most fully realized articulation of any idea that came up,” Nance says. “It meant we had to engage all the ways you could articulate something. That’s why there are so many different types of media.”

“Random Acts” has been described as a variety show, but Nance doesn’t think that’s accurate.

“I think the word variety show connotes comedy, and I don’t think the show is principally comedic,” he says. “We use humor from time to time, but who doesn’t? There’s no hosts, there’s no person sitting behind a desk.”

Instead, the sketches blend seamlessly into each other. If “Random Acts” has a unifying theme, it’s this: showing different facets of the African-American experience.

“Obviously I’m black and in America, so I don’t have to intentionally attempt to depict the African American experience — anything I am experiencing is the African-American experience,” says Nance.

Nance, who grew up in Dallas, Texas, now lives in Brooklyn, which is also where most of “Random Acts” was filmed. His first film, “An Oversimplifica- tion of Her Beauty” premiered at Sundance in 2012, but “Random Acts” marks his first foray into television.

“There wasn’t so much a learning curve on how to make a show,” he says. “It was more like how to work in an environment where we have a network and hard deadlines and a bigger mechanism and a team that you have to interact with regularly.”

He says it feels appropriate to have a midnight airing.

“Because I don’t watch TV on TV probably ever, it’s a little bit foreign to me — the idea that there’s a time you have to tune in,” he says. “So that’s not my experience of watching things, but I think [midnight] is a kind of a poetic time.”