HERU

_The magic of Random Acts lies in its variety, with Nance and his team using everything from game sequences, dancing fire figurines, animated fables, and documentary-style montages to move the story along in dimension and scope. Co-writer Jamund Washington is adept at creating characters we can’t wholly root for: They are as flawed, brilliant, and unaware as we all are. Through complex characterization—like Najja’s push for sharp relationship boundaries, all while keeping Terence nearby—Washington and the Random Acts writing room build characters that live in us, characters who are scared, trying their very best, and living through various contradictions all at once. 

One of the series’s strongest moments happens in episode two, when an argument between Terence and Najja is expanded. The characters’ voices overlap and their shadow selves are superimposed in the background to elicit the feeling of emotional shift happening unconsciously. It speaks to how human beings show and hide our varied forms in moments of conflict. Scenes like this one highlight the power of collaboration: Random Acts’s cinematic universe—built along with Nance’s longtime collaborator and director of photography, Shawn Peters—makes the spiritual, multi-dimensional, and political worlds run together as nonlinearly as they exist in real time. On first watch, this style of programming is disorienting to say the least, but it sits on our spirit and it cuddles up next to us at night as we think through all the ways our best and worst selves speak for us unconsciously when we’re at our most vulnerable.  

Each character in Random Acts has generations-long work of renaming, rebirthing, and living in different timescapes to heal the centuries of genocide of Black people in the physical and spiritual realms. The second season, with its focus on African spirituality and political commentary, recalls 1994’s Cosmic Slop, a science fiction anthology series hosted by Parliament-Funkadelic’s George Clinton. Cosmic Slop delved into similar realms, using short stories about how the genocide of Black people is an everyday reality that we are not allowed to name as such. Random Acts renders white people invisible while never ignoring the histories of genocide, colonialism, and anti-blackness that impact its characters’ abilities to access their healing.

The rhythm of the show plays well into Nance’s Southern roots; the pace of feeling and texture that he deploys is reminiscent of DJ Screw’s ability to bend time, play with memory, and make other worlds. Whether he’s chopping up a scene of conflict between Najja and Terence, or screwing the vocals of XXXX as he explains the fictional “Bitch Better Have My Money” app, Nance uses these interpolations of distortion and repetition to reflect how memory, in all its forms, can move us in and out of time. Though DJ Screw and the Screwed Up Click’s influence was birthed in Houston, the imprint of Dallas and the various homelands of Texas hip-hop are evident in the show’s ability to melt time with ease. 

Although much of first half of the new season is based in Brooklyn, the main characters eventually embark on their own familial healing journeys, with Naijja returning to Liberia to face a legacy of war and Terence facing the theft and erasure of his familial name in the face of a new land grab in Hays County, Texas. The modern day struggle for reparations and land acquisition by formerly enslaved Black people is happening in real time. In January 2023, Rep. Sheila Jackson once again reintroduced H.R. 40, a 34-year-old bill to study and make suggestions about the material impacts of chattel slavery and white supremacy on descendants of formerly enslaved Black people. “It is time for this legislation, as a response to the inaction of [this] Nation, to be implemented as an Executive Order by the President of the United States,” Jackson wrote recently on Twitter. In Random Acts, Terence and Najja’s story arcs show how the very real return to the land is just one step in a longer journey that crosses multiple planes of healing.

While some of the show’s criticism in 2018 revolved around it being too focused on making white people empathize with the Black experience, Nance requires viewers to watch the second season with new eyes. The Parable of the Pirate and the King asks Black people to sit in the weight of our liberation and the cost of world-building when we take our healing seriously though ritual. The new series ends where it rightfully should, with Terence hand in hand with Najja, declaring in front of their family and ancestral spirits: “I release this hungry motherfucking ghost of greed.” Random Acts does the work of layering feeling, memory, and time to explore the nerve that is consciousness—and not just in the political understanding of the term, but in the idea that we as Black people are entitled to have every version of ourselves touch freedom in this lifetime.