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 as part of 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.

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.