In the summer of 2021, Vince Staples, the 31-year-old Long Beach rapper, dropped his self-titled album, followed by Ramona Park Broke My Heart less than a year later, and rounded out his decade-spanning six-album run with Def Jam Records with 2024’s Dark Times. Amid this prodigious musical output, Staples—who had previously demonstrated a keen eye and interest in visual culture through incisive music videos and guest turns in film and television, including as a love interest on Abbott Elementary—fully stepped into his own as a visual auteur.
In 2019 Staples released a two-episode web series titled The Vince Staples Show in collaboration with Calmatic. In the opening scene of episode 1, “So What?,” Staples proclaims, “I need some of that Netflix money.” After having its production and release delayed by the Covid-19 pandemic, The Vince Staples Show premiered in February 2024 as a Netflix production, executive-produced by Kenya Barris of black-ish fame. Other TV shows featuring fictionalized rappers, the FX productions Dave and Atlanta—created by Dave Burd (Lil Dicky) and Donald Glover (Childish Gambino), respectively—created distance between their rap and TV personas. Childish Gambino seemingly doesn’t exist in the world of Atlanta, which finds Glover in a supporting role as manager to the fictional aspiring rapper Paper Boi, and Dave centers on a version of Lil Dicky that also remains aspiring, having not yet found mainstream success in the rap landscape.
Staples collapses this creative and perhaps protective distance in his own show, creating a fictionalized version of himself, the rapper Vince Staples, grounded in the autobiographical, success and all. Though it shares a similar premise to the web series of a hypothetical day in the life of the rapper Vince Staples, the Netflix and Barris backing also comes with updates. In the web series episode “Sheet Music,” Staples’s girlfriend catches him in another girl’s bed via an Instagram post and proceeds to acquire a Taser and show up to his house to confront him. In the Netflix series, Staples’s girlfriend appears as a decidedly sanitized sitcom figure, and one of noticeably lighter skin tone, perhaps to appear more palatable to a wider audience. Her role is largely one of support, and even when the two begin to fight at the end of episode 4, the fight serves as mere background fodder both visually and auditorily, and the scene quickly fades to black.