This was published 10 months ago
I couldn’t get a handle on this odd hip hop comedy, but I’m hooked
By Karl Quinn
The Vince Staples Show, Netflix
★★★★
The five episodes of The Vince Staples Show are titled Pink House, Black Business, Brown Family, Red Door and White Boy. But thematically, they’re all shades of black.
The real Vince Staples is an African-American rapper from Long Beach, California, who began performing with the Odd Future crew, whose members also included Frank Ocean and Tyler, The Creator. He’s released five albums since 2015, he’s done a bunch of films and TV shows, and he’s got a decent-sized social media presence, where he’s known as a bit of a joker.
Wheels within wheels: Vince Staples (Vince Staples) in The Vince Staples Show.Credit: Netflix
The Vince Staples Show gives us a version of Vince Staples that draws on all of that, while at the same time presenting its titular character as the most deadpan man alive.
He’s not funny, though funny (or at least odd) stuff happens around and to him all the time. Most of it is related, in one way or another (and in an echo of Kenya Barris’ insistence in Black AF that “everything is about slavery”) to his blackness.
The Vince of the show is semi-famous, but still very much one of the boys in the ’hood. In the first episode he is pulled up by a traffic cop after doing a U-turn, then jailed because there seems to be a warrant out for him for assault. The cops know him, like his music, treat him as a bit of a celebrity. But still, he’s a suspect, so no favours, aight?
When he calls his alcohol-soaked, Jesus-loving mother Anita (Vanessa Bell Calloway) hoping she will bail him out, she refuses. “I have told you about that shit, Vincent. No U-turns. Three rights and a left. A U-turn is just asking for trouble.”
So much of the show is like that: a matter-of-fact (and fiction) depiction of life as a black man in America. Stuff happens, a lot of it not great, but that’s just the way it is. But beneath all that deadpan wry humour there’s a seething fury.
The series opens with gunshots and a radio report of a shooting; it ends five episodes later (the shortest just 18 minutes long) with the same.
Each of those two episodes ends with a scene almost identical, other than clothing. Vince comes home and his girlfriend Deja (Andrea Elsworth) ignores the pistol on the coffee table and asks “How was your day?”
“It was cool,” he answers.
“Anything interesting happen?”
“Not really.”
Only occasionally does The Vince Staples Show play as outright comedy. And even though absolutely everything in it is situational, it is never anything as formulaic as a sitcom.
The show Atlanta, starring Donald Glover, is reminiscent of The Vince Staples Show.Credit: Invision
If any of this rings a bell, that’s fair: it’s impossible to watch The Vince Staples Show and not think of Atlanta, the not-quite-comedy starring Donald Glover (aka the hip-hop artist Childish Gambino) as Earn, the manager of rapper-on-the-rise Paper Boi (Brian Tyree Henry).
Like that show, there’s an air of the surreal about much of what happens, even as it rubs up against a sense of veracity that comes from truly knowing the world, the characters, and the life it depicts.
Because it’s episodic and full of non-sequiturs, it’s sometimes hard to get a handle on what The Vince Staples Show is aiming for. But by the time it was over, I couldn’t wait to see where it goes next.
Contact the author at kquinn@theage.com.au, follow him on Facebook at karlquinnjournalist and on Twitter @karlkwin, and read more of his work here.
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