Netflix has cancelled The Vince Staples Show, despite the critical acclaim that earned the series a score of 94% on reviews aggregator site Rotten Tomatoes.
The series followed a fictionalized version of Compton-born rapper Vince Staples and ran for two seasons from 2024 to 2025.
Deadline reported that the show’s viewership significantly declined between its first season, which was watched 4.6 million times in its first four months, and its second, which was watched 1.7 million times between its release in November 2025 and the end of the year, with the vast majority of streaming views expected to occur within the first 90 days.
The show was set in Long Beach, California, where Staples grew up. In 2021, he told The Independent that his experience there gave him perspective and that rapping was a crucial escape.
“Coming from where I come from and what I was doing prior to music, and what a lot of my family and friends are subjected to,” he said, with typical candor, “I can only be grateful [for music].”
In 2024, Staples opened up about the surrealism of the show in an interview with Associated Press, saying: “My first couple I guess, introductions to cinema, as we see it, would probably be The Twilight Zone, The Wizard of Oz, those kinds of things, watching them with my grandparents. And I’ve always liked the idea of the unknown or just a perceived reality down to something as simple as Toy Story or A Bug’s Life, dealing with perception, especially as a child.
“As you get older, you learn about David Lynch, you learn about the Coen brothers, you learn about Roy Anderson. You watch Donnie Darko and you’re like, okay, ‘What’s happening? What’s not happening?’”
He continued: “Those kind of things always were interesting to me. Especially because I grew up in a place where you have two different sides of how people view the city and it’s like, ‘Oh, I don’t want to go right there.’ And it’s like, ‘Why not?’ You know what I mean? Like, it’s always been an interesting kind of contrast within our environments.
“And I think I digested that at a young age. And as I grew, I grew an affinity towards it, so to say. So I definitely wanted to make sure that the show had a lot of elements of surreal cinematography, as well as storytelling and making sure the audience in the show will probably perceive certain things to be real or not real, and it’s honestly all over the place.”