All right, let’s get it out of the way: Netflix has a new show with rapper and actor Vince Staples, called The Vince Staples Show (from Thursday 15 February), and there is no way we are getting through this without referencing the fact that it shares some genetic material with rapper and actor-created shows Atlanta (which I loved) and Dave, which I loved right up until the last three minutes of the season three finale (come to think of it, I also hated the entire fifth episode of season three) – the entire Brad Pitt section! Come on!
This isn’t just because all three shows have an actor-rapper in them, by the way. As with Dave, Staples plays a version of himself inflected by fame: people come up to him and recognise him, certain doors are opened and wheels are greased as a result of who he is, he is randomly adored or hated by passersby, and that’s a really interesting and fun texture for a show to have. And, much like Atlanta, there’s a woozy, anything-could-happen quality to what’s going on (an episode set in an off-brand theme park is so Atlanta I did wonder whether they found a rejected script in a big bin behind the studios at FX). Right, I’m glad we cleared that up.
This is a good thing, though. A small part of me does rankle against the fact that, for some reason, the only TV writers allowed to create ambitious, meta, surreal TV shows with gorgeous direction have to prove themselves as bestselling music artists first. (If an ordinary “writer” wrote the first episode of The Vince Staples Show, it would be mushed through a mill of producers who insist on “story beats” and “perhaps an extra character” and “I want to know more about the girlfriend”: Vince Staples can just say “but I’m Vince Staples” and shut those conversations down.) The point is, these ambitious shows are actually being made, and they’re being made in such a number and to such a high quality that they are becoming a genre of their own. Sure, for now, Vince Staples is one of the few people on Earth afforded the freedom to make something as lush and weird and meandering as The Vince Staples Show. But the template exists now, and one day someone will be able to make a show like this without having to spend a couple of years in Odd Future first.
In the show, Staples plays a deadpan version of himself in a semi-surrealised version of Long Beach, California. (It is simply called the Beach; each episode opens with the words: “This is a work of fiction. Any similarities to actual events are purely coincidental.” I personally quite like that rappers have reclaimed “being a bit pretentious”.) He is deliberately flat and normal while chaos and weirdness unfurls around him. It’s a bit like when a successful Live at the Apollo comedian is given their own BBC Two sitcom, and they always write themselves as The World’s Most Normal Man, and every barista they encounter (it’s always a barista) is a rude maniac, and the only joke is them blinking fast a couple of times and saying “OK” while people contort weirdly next to them. The way Staples does it is far cooler, though, and the weirdness around him tempered adroitly – it never bulges out into full, unbelievable weird, just something bristling at the edges – and there is a knot at the centre of his character, a quiet discomfort with his level of fame and the presumption that he’s just a musician, that makes this more interesting than “man with no emotions has difficult interaction with a hospitality worker”.
This is not going to be a show for everyone – it’s quite ambient, one episode is inexplicably only 18 minutes long (why even turn the camera on? Go and write more script!) and sometimes it does stray into a TV pet peeve of mine which is “things happening with no explanation and no further mention at all” – but broadly I am just happy that there’s a new, interesting, weird genre of television happening. If this is what rappers are doing then just cut out the middleman and give them all a development deal right now. I want to see what Ice Spice does when given access to a former Top Boy director, a writers’ room full of Princeton graduates, a quarter-million dollar budget and carte blanche to do whatever the hell she feels like. The future of TV is somewhere in that equation, I can feel it.
