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Positive:
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Mixed:
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Negative:
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Critic Reviews
ColliderFeb 21, 2023
Season 6 Review:
While the particulars of the conflict matter less than the emotions and ideas underpinning them, the balance that is stuck ensures the series remains a strong one. Whenever the dust settles on this collapsing empire, both the one Franklin has built and America itself, the tragedy of Snowfall is shaping up to be as potent as the delicate craft on display from all involved.
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Feb 15, 2022
Season 5 Review:
With season five, the show seems to be taking some steps forward—maturing, resetting some relationships and setting up some difficult moral choices for these characters as the season rolls on. Snowfall just feels different this time around, as it shifts gears and focuses not on getting power, but how one might hold on to it when the whole landscape is changing.
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Feb 15, 2023
Jul 8, 2019
Jul 18, 2018
Season 2 Review:
At its worst, this is a still-not-quite-there prestige drama, but at its best and most interesting, it plays like a very solid 1980s B movie, the kind that young filmmakers and critics would have discovered two decades after it came and went, then scrambled to remake.
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Jul 6, 2017
Season 1 Review:
The most striking thing about Snowfall, though, is that it never seems less exciting, less special, than when it’s doing the standard Scorsese/Tarantino thing and putting groups of treacherous men (and a few women) at cross purposes, then watching them threaten and bluff each other until the guns come out (or don’t).
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Jul 5, 2017
IndieWireJun 29, 2017
Season 1 Review:
The episodic writing is clean, with a sturdy structure and traditional arcs. More often than not, what happens in the first few minutes comes back around in the final few. But given how much TV is out there and how competitive the market is because of it, it’s less interesting to watch anything familiar.
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Jul 6, 2017
Season 1 Review:
Created by John Singleton with Eric Amadio and Dave Andron, Snowfall is a good-looking production. It gets its music from turntables and boomboxes and it reminds us that South Central Los Angeles, for all its notoriety, has a lot of tree-lined streets and perfectly decent houses with front yards. It also reminds us that crack cocaine was not so much a brand new problem as the consequence of several larger and longer-simmering problems.
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RogerEbert.comJul 5, 2017
Season 1 Review:
It’s the regular ensemble of the show that really makes Snowfall work. Idris is a fantastic find, conveying a combination of intelligence and innocence that makes Franklin’s arc feel genuine. ... The first half of the season, in which the writers are allowed to build character instead of feeling like they have to do something as big as chronicling the history of a culture-changing drug, is stronger than the second.
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Jul 5, 2017
Season 1 Review:
There are times when Snowfall tries too hard for poignant irony, such as setting the scene of a vicious beat-down endured by young Franklin to the breezy beauty of Bill Withers’s song “Lovely Day.” But if you’re in the mood for a dark but sunny, meticulously detailed TV-show-as-novel narrative, Snowfall may draw you in.
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Jul 5, 2017
Season 1 Review:
Snowfall meanders more than some people may have the patience to endure, and the details written into some of its dialogue may complicate its pacing more than illuminating the tale. On top of that, it’s a slow burn. But its potential is intoxicating, and the high caliber of its writing--shepherded by Andron as its showrunner and producers such as Thomas Schlamme and Leonard Chang--glows throughout its initial hours.
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The Daily BeastJul 5, 2017
Season 1 Review:
The curious thing about Snowfall is how glaringly the ask it is making of its viewers is at odds with the tension rising between the various players in the complicated drug ring depicted onscreen: an assumption of patience, and blind trust that it will deliver. ... The performances rise to the ambition of the material, especially Idris in the lead role, Michael Hyatt as his protective mother, and Amin Joseph as his conflicted uncle.
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TV Guide MagazineJul 6, 2017
Season 1 Review:
The show is engrossing and well acted. ... Yet little about this series feels fresh or urgently electrifying. [10-23 Jul 2017, p.13]
Jul 5, 2017
Season 1 Review:
The problem is that the series is split among three narratives, and the time spent on the other characters dilutes a story that could have been told through Franklin. They are given equal time but half the depth, and since their stories take so long to intersect, Snowfall can feel like a meandering exercise in patience.
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Jul 5, 2017
Season 1 Review:
The acting is good, and Snowfall does these transformations well, but it’s not what supposedly sets it apart. If we’re not going to see more of the before picture--and of the people, like Franklin’s mother, Cissy (Michael Hyatt, Crazy Ex-Girlfriend), who are doing their best to keep things together--then what is Snowfall waiting for? Snow, already.
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Jun 29, 2017
Season 1 Review:
The acting is mediocre all around, and the direction is slick but anonymous, with the look of any number of B-movie crime thrillers. That would be okay for a show with B-movie ambitions, but Snowfall seems to be aiming higher, only to fall back on the kind of overused devices it should be subverting.
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Jun 28, 2017
Season 1 Review:
There is no logical motivation for any of the main characters to do what they do. In fact, what motivates Lucia, Oso, Franklin and Teddy isn’t logical: It’s addiction. One way or another, each character is driven beyond the point at which their actions can be tempered by logic, and we are called on to suspend disbelief in a very specific way in the case of “Snowfall.” That’s both an ambitious and a dangerous approach to characterization.
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Jun 21, 2017
Season 1 Review:
Because it's not just those three main players that Snowfall focuses on, but myriad people around each of them. By telling bits of the story involving those additional characters, Snowfall never seems to get around to the actual story of crack. Most series that get by despite complicated storylines or a lagging pace do so with top-tier writing and standout performances.
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Jul 5, 2017
Season 1 Review:
Snowfall ticks all the boxes of a prestige drug drama. But its characters often feel like ciphers, generic stand-ins for the various factions implicated in cocaine’s rise. Singleton can’t quite get to the core of why these sympathetic and intelligent people would be so willing to risk everything for a business whose ugliest elements seem to horrify them.
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