COVER STORY | Vince Staples and His Comedic Dystopia
The rapper, comedian and actor talks questioning reality, merging small details with deadpan absurdity, giving Long Beach the real TV portrayal it deserves, and his new Netflix breakthrough, The Vince Staples Show. Warning: spoilers ahead.
Photos by Erik Carter & Greg Noire Comedy Features Vince Staples
Over the last five years, Vince Staples has done it all. He put out two great records (Vince Staples and RAMONA PARK BROKE MY HEART) back to back, created a comic book called Limbo Beach, was cast in the Hulu remake of White Men Can’t Jump and, recently, snagged a recurring role on the smash-hit network show Abbott Elementary. Now, he’s resurrected The Vince Staples Show, what once existed as a surreal, bite-sized look into Staples’ freaky psyche on YouTube and is, now, Netflix’s most-recent short-form triumph. It’s been a minute since the streaming titan took a risk like this on a show, a string of 20-minute rap-comedy vignettes depicting the wild and wonderful and unpredictable and nuanced ecosystem of Staples’ home in Long Beach, California.
Staples has said it himself that The Vince Staples Show is the best thing to happen to Black comedy since A Raisin in the Sun, that it’s our generation’s Martin and our generation’s Seinfeld and our generation’s Casablanca. The Vince Staples Show is a moment in television history where, for the first time ever, Black thinkers, actors and writers aren’t being boxed in—single names and faces aren’t being expected to carry the representation for an entire community of people. Such a momentous transition in entertainment has opened the door for minds like Staples and artists who are unafraid of embracing the creative, deadpan leaps of their own niche abstractions. Staples isn’t interested in performing Blackness for the sake of catering to Netflix’s propensity for spoon-feeding white audiences. If you’re not in on the joke, then you’re not in on the joke. And that’s what makes The Vince Staples Show not just a rewarding accomplishment, but a dry, fictionalized portrayal of real people and real places affected by mass incarceration, gun violence and familial relationships. It’s uncomfortable, uncompromising and fearless at every turn—equal parts satire, nightmare and acid trip.
Vince Staples grew up with his eyes glued to his grandparents’ television set, pouring over The Twilight Zone and The Andy Griffith Show. You can see elements of the former present across The Vince Staples Show, as each segment is, essentially, a bottle episode with a foreground narrative that holds no real continued presence throughout (the background pieces and gestures, however, tell a different story, if you’re paying enough attention). But The Vince Staples Show misses no opportunities to merge elements of Rod Serling’s brilliance with Lynchian humor and Chappelle Show absurdities. “[The Twilight Zone] never got boring,” Staples tells me from his home in Los Angeles, “and I think an anthology-type show is always something that’s going to be dear to my heart. We tried to borrow as much of that as we could and throw it into this new format.”
The Vince Staples Show is still just a sample of what Staples has to offer to the world of television. The first season runs a mere five episodes, all of them barely crossing the 20-minute threshold (a sixth episode was filmed but lost because, according to Staples, they “shot on location with steadicam in the ghetto while it was raining”). But even then, it arrives as one of the best new Netflix Originals in a hot second. With barely two hours of material to sift through, there’s virtually no room for error—and Staples makes good use of his limited runtime to stretch his legs and hit the ground running, getting arrested within the first two minutes of episode one for making a U-turn, “Pink House.” Staples teamed up with executive producer Kenya Barris, the showrunner of black-ish, and co-creators Ian Edelman and Maurice Williams. The latter two were, as Staples puts it, “godsends.” Edelman and Williams both echoed a similar mantra: “This is The Vince Staples Show. We can’t tell Vince what to do, he can do whatever he wants.”
And that freedom was a relief for Staples, who was able to learn the ins and outs of traditional TV and then, under the tutelage of Barris, Edelman and Williams—all of whom nabbed writing credits for Kid Cudi’s Entergalactic in 2022—was taught how to bend and break those rules and styles. “[They] made sure that I always had information, made sure that my ideas were always expanded on, that nothing was too crazy or too out there,” Staples says. “Because, sometimes, it does kind of get like that, especially with the way that my brain works. Ian and Maurice always were very, very, very supportive of the vision that I had for the show. And they tried really hard. It was a feat, you know? Especially for a first-timer. They tried really hard to make sure that I understood how to create the television show and then, when we got there, we got what we got. And I think we’ve got something very unique. It also works. It’s practical, it’s not too crazy.”
Though the show does get a little bonkers at times. It’s a methodical, slow-burn program that forces you to find humor in the slightest details. Whether that’s racist cops loving the “Norf Norf” music video, or Vince having a family member named JJ who quite strikingly resembles a certain Hall of Fame running back-turned-acquitted murderer, or a woman getting a BBL in a laundromat, or Vince finding a shank in his jail cell because he watched a guy shit out a crack pipe, or Rick Ross showing up for one minute and talking about chicken farms in a bank, or the show blurring out the dial pad on a phone and censoring Vince’s real name when he says it, or Vince finding a Draw Two Uno card in a sandwich—they’re all happening with the same kind of comedic timing as Ray J’s beanie constantly switching positions on his head in the “Sheet Music” episode of the YouTube edition of The Vince Staples Show. They’re moments that are, yes, outlandish, but they’re the kinds of things you see over and over again on-screen across the work of folks like Vince Gilligan or the Coen Brothers. And no matter how out-there they might initially be, they resonate eventually, if only because it lets you know that those things are possible. Staples is comfortable portraying these things because he knows that, time and time again, they work.
Staples has been vocal in the past that, once his music is released, that’s it. When an album hits streaming, he’s done looking for any type of response to it—no longer interested in receiving validation about its quality. That’s why you’ll never catch him beefing with a reviewer or trying to argue for or against a genre label, etc. He’s acutely aware of interpretation and perspective, and he’s quite unbothered by his art being discerned in ways that perhaps, when he was making it in the first place, weren’t even on his mind.
Putting out The Vince Staples Show requires the same kind of selflessness as putting out something like FM! or Big Fish Theory. It’s the scale and responsibility that changes. To create great art, if you’re able to think about what’s missing in the representation and presentation for you and for others while also being selfless at the same time—and as long as you’re happy with whatever art you’ve created—sharing it with others and watching its arc bow, flex and break when absorbed by someone else is the easy part. Staples is level-headed about the whole ordeal, calling back to the hours and hours he spent obsessing over Back to the Future and Kill Bill as a teenager and finding parts of himself in those stories:
“It’s less about me and more about the perspective of the viewer,” he says. “ If you’re a viewer and you’re seeing something, it’s up to you to interpret it how you want. I’m just grateful for the people who consume the product, because I’m pretty sure the way I looked at some of those shows or some of those films when I was younger wasn’t the intention of the creator—but that’s what I got from it. And, as long as people are digesting and are able to walk away with something, that means the most to me—because I already got the gift from the art by being able to create it and figure out whatever I was trying to figure out in my brain. So, I think it’s only right for them to have that same sort of connectivity to it. However they view it is how they view it. I’m just happy that they saw it fit to take time out of their lives to digest what I created.”
Working on a television show has taught Staples how to be more intentional with his vision, if for no reason other than everyone else working alongside you gets to benefit from that confidence and deliberation. Whether he’s having conversations with line producers and directors, or building relationships with PDs and wardrobe techs, he’s making sure that what he wants The Vince Staples Show to be is felt and seen by everyone who’s helping him bring it to life. And doing so, in Staples’ own words, “allowed everyone to know what was going on and get passionate about the project.” When Staples is putting together a song, he’s got three, maybe four minutes to tell his story. Maybe it fits with the overarching narrative of the complete record, but you have limited space to get your point across. That muscle gets to flex differently for Staples when it comes to script-writing for him, as he has about 5x the space to convey a message and new barriers he has to learn to hurdle.
“It’s a challenge—and there are always gonna be more borders—but it’s obviously easier for me, if it doesn’t have to rhyme and shit. There’s more time and more explanation. I’m kind of detail-oriented,” Staples says. “With script-writing, I have the same gifts that I have in music—in that I’m able to do things quickly. We got in the room, and I was able to write scripts and re-draft scripts in a couple hours—maybe an hour, hour-and-a-half, two hours, tops. Maurice made it very known that that was not normal, that we had a cheat code that led me into that leadership space. I grew to learn how to do these things over and over and over again and get the repetition going, not feeling pressured about it. And I’m not pressured with music, as well. The connectivity—the speed in which I’m able to create things—is also the speed in which I’m able to move on from them if they’re not working or they’re not resonating with people and finding another way to approach the same idea.”
The first episode of The Vince Staples Show premiered on YouTube in August 2019, but the concept of the show’s genesis stretches as far back as 2016, when Staples and his team first brainstormed a leap into longer media—which stemmed from his propensity for placing such witty and ambitious intentionality behind his music videos and interviews. It helped that Staples had folks in his orbit who were keen on persistently telling him just how good at making a comedy show they thought he’d be. “It took a couple of meetings; it didn’t pan out the way we had hope,” he admits. “I feel like, at that time, people just felt like we weren’t ready. It wasn’t enough reason to give us the opportunity.” To get more experience with industry inner-workings, Staples took on some voice-acting gigs—doing small bit parts on American Dad, MFKZ and Gully and appearing on 20 episodes of Lazor Wulf.
Fast-forward to now, and the thematic motivation for The Vince Staples Show remains the same, even with a Netflix budget. “It’s not really a show, it’s more so an idea or perspective or commentary on certain things. That’s kind of how I view things,” Staples continues. “It’s never like ‘I have a song’ or ‘I have an album.’ It’s ‘I have a thought, how do I utilize these different mediums of art to shuffle through those thoughts and come up with an answer to whatever questions I might be raising in my own head?’” When it came to the show, Staples worked through several versions of how he views life, fame, what’s real and what’s not—questioning each element as they appeared. Now, five years later, he’s confident he’s gotten a lot of those answers. “But more questions have been raised, which is great, because it allows me to think about how to create the show further,” he concludes.
Staples is a scholar of film and television. That doesn’t mean he has a Letterboxd account stashed away somewhere, but he’s like an eager student, stashing away tricks and tools he sees in the works of the Coen Brothers and Adam McKay and Roy Andersson so he can later implement them into his own creative vision. While Staples is fond of how the subtleties of comedy are presented in something like Kevin Smith’s Mallrats, Andersson’s About Endlessness, in particular, is quite representative of what The Vince Staples Show is trying to say about meaninglessness and cyclicality and how the vignettes of our lives mirror or contrast those of others—how the humor is in the universality of indescribable mischief, community and connection, be it paternal or romantic. When Staples put out “LAW OF AVERAGES” three years ago, he said that he’d felt like he was always trying to tell the same story—and he’s right. While most of his albums deliver new ways of looking at the same memories, they relish presenting them through new kinds of nuance every time.
On The Vince Staples Show, the final episode ends just as the first episode ends, with Vince coming home and embracing his girlfriend Deja on their couch and saying nothing interesting happened that day—despite each day being adventurous and chaotic and violent and absurd. The idea is, we come home to our people all the same—and Staples has a sharp interest in the relationship between the mundane and the fascinating. Love and connection is our core motivation, and everything else going on is just preventing us from dedicating every waking second of our lives to it. “The way that we told the stories and the way that we started to enter them, these small moments are important because, when you’re playing with so many different versions of reality, you kind of want it to be almost at the backburner—because we distract ourselves as human beings so fucking much,” Staples says. “Fame is a distraction, money is a distraction, love and admiration is a distraction—just to make us feel better about the world that we live in. I wanted that to be important on the show, [but also] while not being important, because that’s the push and pull of the reality of how we wake up every day.”
In episode four—“Red Door”—Vince accompanies Deja (Andrea Ellsworth) and her siblings to Surf City, a fictional amusement park in Long Beach. In Staples’ comic book, Limbo Beach, the story takes place at an abandoned amusement park on a fantastical island. It’s a motif that’s become recurring in his work, and is inspired by the Pike in Long Beach. Staples is particularly interested in how the city of Los Angeles was rebuilt on gentrification, and how that intersects with him and his siblings being 10 or 11 with a 50-year-old mom—that their escape, and what their parents saw as having fun, was a theme park.
“You think about Knott’s Berry Farm or Disneyland, the gentrification and displacement of people within these areas—all of these theme parks are in bad neighborhoods, low income neighborhoods, because that’s where they could buy the land and push the people out,” Staples explains. “The concept of fun, the concept of amusement, is always interesting to me—because these are life-threatening, you-can-die-if-one-small-thing-goes-wrong types of contraptions that we’ve created and, if you look it up, it gets pretty sick, when it comes to people getting hurt on these things. That’s just been funny to me, for lack of better words.” The near-death experiences Vince has at Surf City stem from Staples’ interest in dystopian themes, David Lynch films and, specifically, the Coen Brothers’ Barton Fink. “I’ve wanted to create my version of that—playing with the idea of the things that people will do for love and the journey for love and how it’s a journey for yourself and just trying to find a way to think about all these things but not really be over the top and annoying with it,” he continues.
On Staples’ albums FM! and RAMONA PARK BROKE MY HEART, he takes different routes towards celebrating Long Beach and the Black life that exists and thrives and survives within it. Because of his writing, it’s a place that exists in hip-hop’s stories and canon. And now, he’s brought Netflix to Long Beach and is documenting the city that made him on a major-market television show. That kind of access is crucial for Staples, whose pursuit in depicting Long Beach was built on trying to erase what the rest of the world has already said about it and the people he considers his neighbors.
“A lot of people, just based on how they might interpret certain media, would think it’s not the best place to be or live a life of fear. That’s not true in the slightest,” Staples explains. “I wanted to make sure that, when we were shooting, it didn’t feel dangerous. It didn’t feel displaced, didn’t feel like it was filled with poverty or violence or disruption—because it doesn’t feel like that, which is why these things end up being tragedies. It’s not a tragedy if you expect it to happen. I think the day-to-day life is the important part. You deal with the bumps and bruises with life, and everyone tells you ‘that’s just life.’ And then, when the drastic thing happens, it doesn’t seem that crazy, because you’ve been told—you’ve been programmed—to think ‘sometimes things happen.’ It’s the same approach that a show like The Sopranos would try to take. It was just our version of that play on reality.”
Staples makes it known that, before our call, his dog pissed on the floor and, aside from that inconvenience, he’s spent his morning breaking down boxes. What for? Who knows. This is his reality. For someone who’s about to put out his own Netflix show, Staples is pretty keen on not switching anything up for the sake of embracing this new chapter in his own reluctant stardom. One of the best recurring jokes throughout the five episodes is the idea that most people don’t actually know who Vince Staples is—be it kids smoking pot in a high school bathroom while Staples is speaking to a class, or a bank robber (Myles Bullock) rapping some of Staples’ song “MAGIC” to a room full of out-of-the-loop hostages. Staples has long been persistent about his disinterest in falling in line with his peers and camping out in Calabasas, or boasting his riches across bars just for the sake of boasting. Even in the synopsis of the show, Vince Staples is famous, but he’s not. He’s rich, but he’s not. He’s a criminal, but he’s not.
As each episode begins with a disclaimer—“This is a work of fiction. Any similarities to actual events are purely coincidental.”—the truth of Staples’ personhood, that he’s a regular dude who sometimes raps, sometimes acts and sometimes writes, is translated in earnest with subtle liberties stretched for the sake of showcasing a string of “that’s life” moments. There are no punchlines, only guest passes into lifetimes we showed up late to and, in turn, could never fill in the blanks about—and that’s where the magic of The Vince Staples Show continues to grow. We don’t know why or how Vince knows the bank robbers, or if his dad is absent in the final episode because he is in jail or because he bailed on Vince and his mom. Is Vince Staples actually famous? Do he and his mom (Vanessa Bell Calloway) really keep posting bail for each other over and over? Did he gun down a childhood rival in a costume store? While family members asking Staples for loans appears in his rapping and the show, everything is a comedic dystopia populated by blurred lines. Fame is a background piece but, if you’re not as gangster as your music videos paint you to be, there are day-long consequences. If you get recognized in jail, your cellmates are going to show you that they can rap pretty good, too.
“It’s living a reality,” Staples explains. “What’s real and what’s not is a really, really big question. And it’s a big question within mental health, it’s a big question within capitalism, it’s a big question within the government. It’s just a real question. And I think, a lot of times, we’d rather lean in on this stuff that’s not real. After Abbott Elementary, it became a little bit different. But, you know, I go through my days pretty much without being bothered. It’s not a crazy thing. Yesterday, it was like ‘Oh, that’s Vince Staples!’ ‘I just walked past Vince Staples.’ ‘Hey, is your name Vince Staples?’ That’s four or five people out of the millions of people that live in Los Angeles. So, the reality is that we make the reality.”
At the end of The Vince Staples Show, we get a callback to episode two, “Black Business,” when Junior (Idris Keith) is eating Kapow! Pops, the cereal Vince tried to get a loan for at the bank. Only a few moments earlier, Junior’s dad was—maybe—killed. It’s another mark of the cyclicality of Staples’ creative brain. The final episode, “White Boy,” begins with Vince growing from a child to an adult in a matter of just a few minutes, a transition marked by his mother’s growing dejection and his dad’s sudden absence. Staples wants his viewers to know that that’s life, that if you don’t know, then you don’t know. The small details are that because, so often, we only pay attention to the very thing we’re supposed to be paying attention to. “White Boy” is a fever dream full of inconspicuous, dangerous, telling moments that examine the weight of the entire show.
“When you’re on the hamster wheel, you don’t know that you’re on it. You just keep running,” Staples says. “[Junior’s] disposition, that kid is Vince. White Boy is Vince. A lot of these characters are just Vince, in literal and figurative ways—it just depends on how deep you want to look into the show. I think, just seeing the continuation of the circle—and seeing yourself within other people—is a big part of it and a big part of the understanding of who these characters are and who these characters want to be.”
A few years ago, in his interview with Hasan Minhaj, Staples said something that has stuck with me ever since. He said that “no one is special, and no one being special allows everyone to be significant.” That right there is the thesis statement of The Vince Staples Show. Vince goes out and spends a day in county jail trying to avoid getting shanked. He helps mediate and negotiate a hostage situation during a bank robbery. He gets lost at an amusement park and nearly dies trying to get a chicken meal for his girlfriend’s little siblings. A childhood rival (someone he doesn’t remember but nicknamed “White Boy”) really wants to kill him. After all of that, Vince goes home to a place of quiet before leaving to do it all over again. It’s an incredible conveyance of how everyone—famous or not—can be a part of something fascinating, even if no one else is around to witness it or believe it.
“In my life, a lot of times I say things that are very serious or just normal, and people think that they’re hilarious. They can’t perceive them as being real,” Staples says. “When we were first trying to shoot the show, before we even tried to do anything ourselves, my manager kept saying ‘Vince tells me something every day that he thinks is normal that I think is crazy or ridiculous.’ Tying some of those things into the show, you’re showing that your life is all based on your perspective . If no one sees what your life is, then that’s a decent answer. But once you start to share the details, then it gets wild—but only if you’re not in on the joke.”
What Staples means is, if the reality of The Vince Staples Show is a reality you share, too, then you’re going to have no issue understanding the crux of the story he’s trying to tell. That’s why you never see any big reaction shots from the characters—because that’s the environment they belong to. “Sometimes, it’s hard to translate for a lot of people—like, ‘Okay, we don’t get the jokes. We don’t get the humor’—because there are no jokes, the humor is that this is the reality. And I think it’s a dark humor. That’s where the darkness comes from,” Staples adds. “The end of the bank episode, [the manager getting shot] might seem like it’s kind of extreme to a lot of people but, you know, in Vince’s frame of mind, walking out of that bank, what else is going to happen if you move and the police have guns out? Even though it’s wrong, it’s the reality of those who are in on the joke. That was very important when creating the show, to draw a clear line in-between the people whose reality this is and the people digesting it. There’s a big line drawn between the audience and the characters.”
The bank episode is monumental, because it carries on Staples’ long-held tradition of juxtaposing hope and beauty with a truth about violence. In his song “THE BEACH,” seaside sounds turn into gunshots. In episode two, Vince and the bank manager are let go by the robbers and, when there is this hope of making it out and getting to live, the manager gets gunned down by a SWAT team. He doesn’t show what happens next, because we know what happens next, as the cops approach Vince and the screen cuts to black. Not everyone is interested in finding that balance, in sometimes offsetting something pretty or miraculous with brutality. But there’s humor in tragedy, and that’s something Staples has not only honed in on but—as those two worlds continuously live side-by-side in the art he chooses to make—has accepted as a non-negotiable truth at this point. He’s not going to phone it in for the sake of being ordinary.
“I’m lucky enough—just based on what I’ve done in music—to be able to stick to what I want to do. And it all depends on what you want. I’m honestly not out here trying to be a billionaire or extremely famous. I just want to make things that keep me afloat mentally, emotionally, spiritually, all the -lly’s that we all care about and shit, right?” Staples says. “To me, I just want to make sure that the things that I’m creating resonate with me, because I know, when I was younger, the things that people think resonated with me—or things that inspired me—often were not the thing. Why make a conventional thing if the conventional thing didn’t make me? Why cheat yourself when this is your life’s work? Your life’s work is your life’s work. Where it ends up is not a worry of mine, because this is just my life’s work. When you live the life that I have and you transition to this, this kind of stuff is easy—because it’s almost like a second wind at something you didn’t think you’d ever get. I wouldn’t give that up.”
All five episodes of The Vince Staples Show are now streaming on Netflix.
Matt Mitchell reports as Paste‘s music editor from their home in Columbus, Ohio.