Are y’all ready for the arrival of The Vince Staples Show on Netflix this week?
Source: Courtesy / Netflix
Vince Staples spoke with Global Grind ahead of the debut of his new Netflix series The Vince Staples Show. Staples opened up about his inspirations for the five-episode series, sharing what he learned about writing for TV and the challenges he overcame to see his vision come to life.
We got the opportunity to preview the series and LOVED it. We predict Staples has a HUGE hit on his hands. That said — we had to ask him about the short five episode season.
“That’s what we got, but hopefully it’ll be plenty more, if everybody watches the show supports it,” Staples told GlobalGrind. “I think the sky is the limit from here.”
The multi-hyphenate talent has seen his star continue to rise since first gaining fame as a rapper, then stepping in front of the camera with a recurring guest role on Abbott Elementary. Now he’s the executive producer and star of a series he co-created which also bears his name.
“What I learned about writing for TV, essentially the biggest thing would be structure and utilization and kind of how to bend the rules so to say,” Vince Staples told Global Grind. “TV goes a certain way, certain page counts, certain act breaks, certain structure, but being able to tie those unique ideas into those structures that would make something great, it’s not necessarily about abandoning the structure as a whole but taking the way that you view things and putting them within the structure. So just learning that in a short period of time, learning how to write in the room with other people, and you have an idea, you lose the idea, you come back around to the idea. Patience. A lot of those things I learned from writing television.”
Source: Netflix / Netflix
We also had to ask the notoriously private Staples if it’s been difficult having a show named after him and balancing putting real pieces of himself into his character while still maintaining his privacy.
“I wouldn’t say so, because within the creative medium, it is very important to feel out your own personal emotions,” Staples reflected. “That’s how we get what we get. I’m one of those people who creates stuff for the process of it. I’m not really about the return. To be honest, if I didn’t get the level of things that I got, I would still do it, just because of what I get from it, as far as being able to cycle through your thoughts, your emotions, your feelings, and come to a different understanding. So for me it’s not really that hard to put stuff onto screen or into music or anything of that nature because you know you’re doing it to infer something else about yourself and also help people understand you further. It was extremely easy because the people who were tasked with these roles just did an amazing job. They were so understanding, they were so appreciative of the opportunity, and also had so many questions and just wanted to know every detail about the people that they were portraying. I also appreciated that, because it meant that it meant almost more to them than it did to me for it to be accurate. They made it easy.”
Source: Courtesy / Netflix
Each episode of The Vince Staples Show finds Vince in a wildly different setting, sometimes with his emotional or physical well-being in danger. We were curious how he arrived at these different scenarios and he told us it was all about getting creative about how much could happen in one day.
“I just wanted to make sure that it was very reflective of what a day could be,” Staples told Global Grind. “We all have our unpredictable days and we have things that start out simple that end up being a headache and how we deal with those things makes us who we are. So I wanted to make sure that we had enough differentiation between all of them to tackle different moments because within all these situations we probably have three or four issues that we’re tackling per episode. I just wanted to make sure that we had enough separation to where we were able to view them all differently, almost kind of how an animation show is, to where everything is different and even though it kind of tackles the same things or the same people you’re not following one story. You’re following an emotional like a state of mind or state of being, so that was the point behind that.
Source: Netflix / Netflix
If there’s anything we’ve learned from covering our favorite television shows, it’s that successfully getting a series to market is no easy task, and The Vince Staples Show has been a long time in the making. Staples talked about some of the challenges he faced on the road to his premiere date.
“Just being able to acclimate to the surroundings, being able to move with the things that change, making the show post-COVID with COVID restrictions, you know — the smallest show, meaning that you don’t have the most shoot days or the most to work with, but still seeing the passion and just the happiness and the joy that came from everybody coming to work every day,” Staples said. “Seeing people be into the ideas that you’re trying to pitch, because you never really know what’s going on, seeing people work tooth and nail, going home late to make a show named after you, like it is the appreciation for the people around me, it’s something that I’ll never forget and that’s my biggest take away from the show. Being able to overcome the hurdles, as well as everyone else being able to overcome the hurdles, and make something that was like trying to race to finish editing before the strike happened. People don’t have to do these things and the things that they did for us, I’ll always be grateful for that.”
Source: Courtesy / Netflix
The Vince Staples Show begins streaming on Netflix February 15
