Snowfall

A program with intriguing characters that tell a taught and engrossing story, Snowfall is a promising new FX series.

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).

The good news is that Snowfall, the searing FX drama about the 1980s crack cocaine epidemic in Los Angeles, does start moving at dazzling speed after a slow, plodding start. The bad news is that this occurs somewhere about the fourth episode.

At its best, Snowfall illustrates the unintended consequences and collateral damage associated with drugs -- characters enter into new alliances at their peril -- while revisiting the CIA's role and shady dealings to advance its foreign-policy objectives.

Snowfall mostly delivers on its promise. But it also benefits from having more room to breathe than most freshman dramas. If Snowfall really wants to establish any kind of empire, it’ll have to run leaner in future installments.

Well-produced and particularly well-acted newcomer with a lot of moving parts, potentially too many.

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.

Snowfall will feel like too much work for some viewers. But those who stick with it will be rewarded with a drama that’s both involving and important.

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.

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.

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.

Snowfall doesn’t get all the way there in season one, but it comes further than you’d expect. And inside its veins runs something vital and alive and different.

Though the show is very skillfully made and impeccably performed overall, it suffers a little from the bloated storytelling issues that are currently endemic to the industry.

For now, it’s a good-looking collection of clichés, dull sensationalism, and echoes of better pulp.

Snowfall is competently made and acted. But its images are just too destructive all around.

The story is gripping enough, and the cast compelling enough to make you want to come back for more. Hopefully, as it moves forward it will focus more on the characters than the ideas they represent.

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.

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.

This is all to say that Snowfall is a better written show than it is a visual show, a grand, tragic story that is admirably inclusive but struggles to reach a personal level.

The result is a show that’s far too scattered, and never builds any narrative momentum because it’s always cutting away to another plotline.

This hyper-violent crime soap from creator, executive producer, director and writer John Singleton is punctuated with some terrific performances fighting against predictable plot bumps.

The show is engrossing and well acted. ... Yet little about this series feels fresh or urgently electrifying. [10-23 Jul 2017, p.13]

Snowfall's unimaginative presentation and narrative shortcuts make it hard to care about its three main protagonists.

Snowfall benefits from strong performances from a cast made up of largely unknown actors, but the show is dark with none of the humor that helped leaven “Breaking Bad.”

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.

It’s fine for a story of broad scope to take its time setting the table, but it needs to hook you on character in the meantime. Only Franklin’s story really does, and that’s almost entirely on the strength of Mr. Idris’s controlled charisma.

In Snowfall, we instead watch the talented cast try to overcome writing more interested in making points than in fleshing out the people involved.

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.

It's told with multiple storylines populated by myriad characters, and it's sort of slow going.

The series, which carries the tagline “How crack began,” has style and a strong lead performance from Idris, but it’s too familiar, especially early on, of other, better drug sagas--more methadone than the real fix.

Snowfall takes a while to get going--and has a tough time, at least in its first two hours, meshing its three main storylines into a pulse-pounding narrative.

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.

It’s not bad, it’s just a bit generic and not particularly engaging.

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.

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.

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.