VINCE STAPLES ALMOST died from asthma. He also stood next to a bank robbery hostage just moments before they were shot in the head by the police. He also joined a gang, he claims, just to kill people. Only one of those moments was turned into a scene in the avant-garde rapper-turned-actor’s surrealistic new Netflix series The Vince Staples Show. But, once you get to know the 30-year-old genius, you’ll understand how he turned the unreal stories of his life into 2024’s weirdest show.
The Vince Staples Show is normalized chaos. It’s the type of show where Vince, playing himself, will do battle with an angered gang of amusement park mascots, pull a gun on someone moments after being released from prison, and still go home to his girlfriend with the emotionless face of a man that just ran a few errands. Unlike most new series that feel like an assembly of algorithmically successful TV tropes (spy thriller rom-com with objectively gorgeous people, anyone?), The Vince Staples Show has an offbeat voice in perfect harmony with its unorthodox world.
Courtesy of Netflix
Shootouts are explained to a child by his father as “grown-up laser tag” they’ll one day be able to participate in. In the middle of a bank robbery, the racial implications of how we view criminals are explained by comparing Queen Latifah in Set It Off with George Clooney in the Ocean’s franchise. The show isn’t absurd for shock value. It’s shocking to keep you attentive to the lessons Vince haphazardly learns. That’s because the brainchild of the show has lived a life most wouldn’t (and didn’t) believe.
The show isn’t easily definable. What’s the elevator pitch for a series where amusement park workers break down the power dynamics of racism in the same episode where Vince goes on a harrowing quest for fried chicken? Staples recalls people not understanding the show when he and his manager were initially pitching it. As he tells Men’s Health, his manager had to explain to executives how Vince would share stories from his actual life that would yield the same reaction from him every time: “‘This is fucking crazy. It makes no sense. But, [Vince would] think it’s completely normal.'”
To untangle the show, you must understand the man’s twisted mind. Staples, a ’90s baby raised in North Long Beach, has a mind that works through things in a one-of-a-kind way until all that’s left are shockingly matter-of-fact views on extremes. He’ll explain his gangbanging past as no different than soldiers who join the army or a lion that doesn’t “make an excuse to kill anybody; he does it because he wants to.” He’s a cinephile who can make a TV show that exists in the nexus between King of The Hill, Chappelle’s Show, and The Twilight Zone. He has opinions on everything, from Ray J supremacy to turning the NBA into the WWE, that might make you want to spend hours in his mind.
And now, with The Vince Staples Show, we can.
Men’s Health: The show has a disclaimer saying it’s a work of fiction, but a few things connect to reality. The cop in the first episode describes you as “the rapper boyfriend from Abbott Elementary,” and your rap career is a focal part of the series. What episode or scene is closest to a true story for you?
Vince Staples: Every episode has things that are extremely familiar, so to say. Everything speaks to a situation in my life that I’ve dealt with. It speaks to the lessons that have been learned. In the pilot, the singing in the jail cell actually happened. The pink house is a real house. All those things are real, but I’m just putting them in the appropriate context where it can be open, and people can feel like they’ve experienced it. Being able to broaden out these small stories is usually where the magic happens.
What was the real-life inspiration for the conclusive gunfight where you’re running from a former childhood classmate shooting after you?
We have a lot of surreal things that happen in the show. The main throughline, to me, creatively, was the idea of what reality is, the idea of perception, the idea of fame. What’s the reality of fame? What’s fake about fame? What’s the reality of life and success? What’s fake about that? What’s fake about the streets? What’s fake about family relationships? What’s real about all those things? So, if you re-watch it and think about the small questions of who’s who, what’s real, and what’s not, then it opens up that episode, especially with the name and likeness thing we have going on. That episode is more metaphorical than any other episode we have, which is why we closed out this part of the series with that. It was to round out the question we’ve been asking the entire time.
Was The Vince Staples Show the original title for the series?
It’s kind of an idea I’ve had for close to a decade. The idea of entertainment has always been interesting to me, because these are our lives and the things that people deal with on a day-to-day basis. And we view it as entertainment. You are almost entertainment for the people around you. We’ve all been to our family members’ houses, and they started talking about what somebody else is going through like it’s a television show. So, the idea of The Vince Staples Show is more metaphorical to the fact that our existence often becomes fodder for other people. That’s how I used to explain my career while talking with my managers and friends. Being at work was like being on The Vince Staples Show.
Speaking of entertainment, you’ve been open about Black people’s trauma and pain being entertainment for others. There’s a certain level of voyeurism that you’ve been critical of. This show touches on issues of gun violence and generational trauma. How would you like this show to be consumed?
I just want it to be consumed, period. It’s important for people to see a full vision and take away from it what they want. Whether they like it or not, I want them to just see what was attempted. I just want people to see it fully, understand the full picture, and then take what they take from it. There’s a lot of hidden messaging and easter eggs. There are a lot of interesting compositions of shots; everything in this show means something. Where everyone is standing… everything matters, every single word matters. Watching it in full really helps digest the metaphorical sentiments of the show.
Courtesy of Netflix
Is your goal to sneak the message within the madness?
An important part of film and television is to show, not say. That was something I really tried to do, just taking from a lot of great filmmakers and great photographers, in general. Learning about the importance of composition. The shot of Vince and his friend in the bank having the conversation while looking small in the frame with all the things happening in the background. Adopting more of an animation style was extremely important because everything has a message, but what’s the message behind the message, and how do you not just say, “This is about Black existence?” How do you just exist? Walking around, we don’t say, “Hey, I’m Black and alive.” You just live. The other parts, even though they’re the most important, are the ones that we tuck in the back the most. So, I wanted the show to be parallel to that in a sense.
I noticed the series was bookended by two endings where you’d come from having a crazy adventure, but still sat on your girlfriend’s couch at the end of the day and said nothing interesting happened. Were you trying to convey Black men’s normalization of trauma?
Your environment is your environment, and you don’t know that something’s wrong with your environment until you escape it. A fish doesn’t know if it’s supposed to be in the ocean if it spends its whole life in a tank. I feel our existence becomes so micro if we don’t ever see anything else. So, as you’re growing up and doing specific cultural things, you don’t realize it’s only your culture. So you can’t tell someone that something went wrong if no one’s ever told you it’s wrong or if you’ve never seen it be anything other than the norm. So, that’s definitely a commentary on how we normalize a lot of things in our lives.
You said you have more stories. I know this show is being billed as a limited series, but are there plans for a Season 2?
Anything is possible with the success of the show and support. That’s why we just ask as many people as we can to support the show. Share the good word and let people know what we’re trying to do because we never know. For right now, we feel like we closed it out in a way where we got our message across, and we can live with it at the end of the day.
You were the only writer credited for the season finale. You went from not knowing how to write a TV episode to doing the season finale of an anticipated Netflix series. What were the things you learned to get you to that place?
It started from trying to get the show brainstormed out. Calmatic, who’s worked closely with me on the project since its very beginning, told me, “You’re not going to get this show done unless you write it yourself. So download Final Draft, it’s $200, and make it work.” Then I sat on the phone with one of our showrunners, Maurice Williams, asking how to do certain things. Our entire writing room–Ian Edelman, Amy Hubbs, Crystal Jenkins, Winter Coleman, and everybody else– helped me learn how to make these things happen. From what they say, I write scripts relatively fast, so I was able to take the reins and kind of be malleable with whatever was going on. Being able to do those really helped, and everybody just helped along the lines of the process. No one told me what to do; they just told me how it’s done. I really appreciated that because it allowed me to still be creative while staying within the constraints of what television is.
It’s a comedy, but you rarely laugh or show any expression.
When you’re dealing with comedy, there are certain ways to make a joke go across. The best way for this show to work, especially when we’re playing with the perception of reality and normalization of certain things, was to play the straight man. We can’t necessarily do the Martin Lawrence/Lucille Ball element of comedy. This approach is more along the lines of what you see in a Coen Brothers film. It worked for what it was supposed to do because we had such a great cast, and we had so many people who were able to do so many nuanced things that allowed me to be the anchor for the jokes. Writing around yourself instead of writing for yourself was a very interesting thing to do. We had the cast to execute it.
Courtesy of Netflix
The final episode, with the blaring red light signifying an impending shootout chase between you and a former classmate years later, gave me Kill Bill vibes. Were there any shows or movies you watched in order to prepare to make your own?
Everything you digest influences your taste level. I was a kid watching The Andy Griffith Show. That informed the way I feel a mundane day would be. Even though crazy things were happening, they were working in a jail. But, there was humanity in every inmate and every worker. With M*A*S*H, they’re in the middle of a war, and it’s a slapstick comedy. I watched [Chappelle’s Show]. The Twilight Zone was really big for me when I was a kid. The Simpsons and King of the Hill were two important shows, and the editing style for [The Vince Staples Show] was directly taken from those two shows. I got older and got into the Coen Brothers and [Quentin] Tarantino. A lot of the frames are Swedish, in a sense, so there was influence from Roy Andersson. There’s the darkness of a [Antoine] Fuqua setup. There were a lot of things we took from Barton Fink. I’m really grateful to be able to execute it at the level we were able to execute it at.
I didn’t know you were this much of a cinephile. Do you have a Letterboxd account?
I just learned what Letterboxd was the other day, and I think I might get one. It seems interesting. I’m not really the social guy. When I was a kid, I spent a lot of time watching TV with my grandfather specifically. One of my best friends growing up was always into film. He actually went to film school. He used to always say, “Let’s go to the movies.” That was his thing. Growing up as kids and having nothing to do, we used to sneak into movies a lot. I wouldn’t say I was a cinephile. I never knew that was a thing when I was a kid. From digesting and learning about life, and then going back and thinking of your experiences, those experiences infer your next steps. You begin to learn the context for all of these things.
Is there a difference between Vince Staples, the rapper and now TV character, and Vincent Staples, the man?
I wouldn’t necessarily say that, but what I will say is people are a lot more nuanced than we give ourselves credit for. It’s our job to explore that nuance and show the many sides of humanity. The many sides of creativity, the many sides of all of these things we have in this thing called life, and that was pretty much the goal for what I was trying to do here. I was just trying to expound on things I’ve already expounded on, but just in a different manner.
Keith Nelson is a writer by fate and journalist by passion, who has connected dots to form the bigger picture for Men’s Health, Vibe Magazine, LEVEL MAG, REVOLT TV, Complex, Grammys.com, Red Bull, Okayplayer, and Mic, to name a few.
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