TV Friday CHANGING ‘ROOM’

Revolving guests stay one night only on wacky series

EXPECT the unexpected when you check into HBO’s “Room 104.”

The new anthology series by brothers Mark and Jay Duplass (“Togetherness,” “Tangerine”) abandons the single-genre focus normally associated with anthologies to alternately embrace styles as diverse as horror, comedy, romance and even dance.

“It’s Russian roulette. Spin the wheel, pull the trigger and see what happens,” Mark Duplass tells The Post by phone from LA. “That’s exciting. There are enough TV show options where you know what you’re getting; we’re something different.”

Taking place in a single room at various points in the motel’s history, the half-hour series features new guests each week. They are played by both familiar faces (Orlando Jones of “Sleepy Hollow,” James Van Der Beek of “Dawson’s Creek” and Amy Landecker of “Transparent”) and actors often relegated to minor parts.

“Part of the real fun is telling stories of characters that normally only exist for maybe a five-to 10-minute role in your average feature film, and the actors themselves who don’t normally get lead roles,” Duplass says. “It’s focusing on the under-represented from not only a story prospective but also from a casting prospective, too.”

For the set, Duplass, 40, built a faux hotel room in a studio a few miles from his home on the east side of LA. To give it a “mundane” feel, the room has been outfitted with green-and-tan walls, drab carpeting and furnishings that are merely functional. At 400-square-feet, it is slightly larger than your average airport lodge accommodation to allow a production crew to film inside.

“It’s not a dirty, seedy motel, nor is it an expensive, glamorous hotel. It is a middle-of-the-road, corporate America motel room,” says Duplass. “I played in bands for years and have stayed in my fair share of double-digit [dollar] per night motels, and that’s what they feel like.”

Duplass says production on each episode was completed in under three days — about half the time it takes to film a 30-minute series. He also wrote seven of the season’s 12 episodes, but doesn’t act in any of them. By contrast, Jay appears in one episode but didn’t write any scripts. Neither brother directed any segments, opting instead to “give hungrier directors a chance to see how their energy connects with ours,” Mark says. The collaboration pays off. In the chilling first episode, “Ralphie” (written by Duplass), a babysitter (played by Davie-Blue) increasingly worries that her young charge, Ralph (Ethan Kent), may be a psychopath.

“My Love” (also by Duplass) features an octogenarian married couple (Philip Baker Hall and Ellen Geer) who want to relive their wedding night 56 years later, with unexpected emotional results.

And in “Voyeurs,” a particularly experimental segment, a motel housekeeper (Dendrie Taylor) has a flashback to her younger self (played by actress and ballerina Sarah Hay) in a dialogue-free story that unspools almost entirely through dance.

“Worst case scenario, we have an interesting failure. Best case scenario, it works,” Duplass says. “And that’s really the spirit of the show.”