Snowfall

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.