Vince Staples Strikes Out

It’s all right if you don’t know Vince Staples. You’ve likely heard his voice or seen his face. The West Coast rapper came up as part of the famous Odd Future collective (other alumni: Frank Ocean; Tyler, The Creator; Earl Sweatshirt) that took hip hop into uncharted, weird and funny territory. He’s also been a pitchman for Sprite and, perhaps most notably, a supporting player on the Emmy-winning Abbott Elementary as Janice’s ex boyfriend Maurice.

Now, he has a Netflix series. The Vince Staples Show is of a piece with the surreal, off-kilter template set by Odd Future, which at once point had a very silly sketch-comedy show called Loiter Squad on Adult Swim for three seasons.

But that was more than a decade ago and like his contemporaries from that group, Staples has matured. His new show, executive produced by Kenya Barris (Black-ish, You People), feels more like a west coast take on Atlanta that tries to capture the experience of being a rising Black star in America.

The show’s first season–Netflix hasn’t renewed it for another but there’s a campaign to bring it back–is only five episodes long and each is on the short side, usually only 20-25 minutes. While there are some good ideas and funny jokes in every episode, the ambition of the overall series exceeds its grasp.

Take the pilot episode, Pink House, which finds Vince pulled over by police and stuck in a Los Angeles jail cell for an outstanding warrant. Nonplussed, Vince calls his mother, who refuses to bail him out, even though he did the same for her recently. He sits, blank faced, as cellmates try to audition their singing skills for Vince or threaten to shiv him. The police officers, who recognize that they have a celebrity in their midst, try to score concert tickets off Vince, but stop short of actually helping him. Later, when Vince is released, he walks home, plops onto the couch, and is joined by girlfriend, Deja, who asks if anything interesting happened. “Not really,” he mutters.

The same scene plays out at the end of the fifth episode after a Quentin Tarantino-inspired chase in which a former classmate stalks Vince. This classmate of the episode’s title, White Boy, ends up getting killed by our hero while the man’s son waits outside a shopping center in a minivan. “Not really,” Vince tells Deja again, when asked on the couch whether he had an interesting day. Every episode begins and ends on a sung music cue with the words, “Fine day” over the title of the show.

Staples himself has explained that this is the through line of these five episodes: that no matter what happens to Vince, the character, it’s just another day in Los Angeles for him. But that’s not much of a hook to base a whole series on: a bunch of surreal, often violent shit goes down but it’s really no big deal in the end. A bizarre trip to a low-rent amusement park has the same stakes as a contentious family reunion barbecue and a bank heist where the robbers happen to be friends of Vince.

The bigger problem with The Vince Staples Show, however, is Staples himself. In keeping with the theme, Staples reacts blankly to almost everything that happens to him. He doesn’t have Donald Glover’s gift of expression where just a raised eyebrow or sideways glance can convey Earn’s entire train of thought in an episode of Atlanta. The choice to make the Vince Staples character a passive sponge to whatever’s going on around him is one that makes it hard to invest in the character, let alone the show built around him.

That doesn’t mean it’s not worth watching. There’s a soothing rhythm to these short films and the visuals, especially in the fourth episode Red Door, stretch the show creatively. But it’ll take a second season to see if The Vince Staples Show has potential for greatness, or if the show is just a series of fine–and only fine–days.