There’s a question that comes up repeatedly in your new show: “Who is Vince Staples?” I figured I’d take it to the source. “I live a pretty simple life,” he explained at one point, “so I have the time to create and rummage through thoughts.” What’s obvious is that Staples is driven by an interdisciplinary love of art and happy to share his with anyone willing to engage. Detailing forays into voice-acting, directing, and writing screenplays, he sounded like a man with a meticulous game plan. I was surprised to hear someone who usually dunks on his naysayers with withering nonchalance express interest in bringing people to some common understanding of each other. Speaking on the phone earlier this month, he explained how the Netflix series fits into his larger project of connecting people and humanizing characters. The Vince Staples Show sticks thanks to Staples’s flair for suspenseful, macabre storytelling and the sturdy supporting cast he chews scenery with. In the interim, Staples released Vince Staples and Ramona Park Broke My Heart, a pair of curt but brilliant West Coast gangsta-rap albums directed the stately, intimate performance video for the latter’s “When Sparks Fly” and co-starred in 2023’s White Men Can’t Jump remake with Jack Harlow and Sinqua Walls. The series - which Staples co-created with Ian Edelman ( Entergalactic, How to Make It in America) and Maurice Williams ( Entergalactic, Broke), and executive-produced with Kenya Barris - got green-lit a few years ago but was stymied by the pandemic. Trailing its subject through a battery of unexpectedly precarious situations - an arrest for speeding, a run-in with an old neighborhood rival - The Vince Staples Show treats notoriety like a ponderous, confusing aura, a nuisance as much as a boon. “I cycle through various mediums,” Staples explains in the episode “Black Business,” in which a routine trip to the bank hangs one delirious left turn after another. In his new Netflix series The Vince Staples Show, the Long Beach polymath plays a version of himself, floating in the nebulous space between well-known and unknown, wealth and weariness. He’s not just a colorful rapper and deadpanning humorist but a director, writer, and actor capable of playing everything from Abbott Elementary’s layabout love interest to an animated wolf with a gigantic laser attached to its back. We need to start talking about Vince Staples as a utility player. “Wherever I end up being, I’m grateful as long as I get to create and make a living off of it.”
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