Snowfall’s first season keeps its footing when it stops trying to be several shows at once

FX’s “Snowfall” opens in Los Angeles in 1983 with a storm on the way. The network and the show’s creators — Eric Amadio, Dave Andron and John Singleton — built six seasons and 60 episodes out of that storm, following the first crack epidemic from its infancy to its radical impact on American culture. The series premiered on July 5, 2017, and signed off on April 19, 2023. It is a crime drama with a wide frame: an African American crime family in South Central, a CIA operative in Nicaragua, a Mexican luchador, a cartel boss’s daughter, and the many ways those lives are fated to collide.

That is a lot of machinery for one show to carry, and “Snowfall” carries it unevenly. The result is a series with a strong spine and too many limbs — good enough to hold six seasons, rarely good enough to justify all of them.

Trailer, via FX Networks.

Franklin Saint and the Saint family

The show’s center is Franklin Saint, played by Damson Idris. He is 20 years old when the story starts, a budding drug dealer who sees the coming market before almost anyone else does. Around him the series assembles an ensemble cast: Michael Hyatt as Cissy Saint, Amin Joseph as Jerome Saint, Angela Lewis as Louanne “Louie” Jones-Saint, Isaiah John as Leon Simmons, Devyn A. Tyler as Veronique Turner, Gail Bean as Wanda Bell.

The family is the show’s best idea. Crime families on television usually arrive fully formed, with rules and a hierarchy and a code. “Snowfall” gives us the formation instead — people who are related before they are organized, who improvise a business out of a household. Franklin’s ambition is the engine, and Idris plays it without much visible strain, which is the point. He is not a monster in the first season. He is a young man doing arithmetic.

The trouble is that the arithmetic is more interesting than the man for long stretches. The series keeps handing Franklin new problems and new partners, and the character’s interior life stays roughly where it started.

Teddy McDonald, El Oso and the Nicaragua thread

The other half of “Snowfall” runs through Teddy McDonald, played by Carter Hudson, a CIA operative working the fight against communism in Nicaragua. Sergio Peris-Mencheta plays Gustavo “El Oso” Zapata, a Mexican luchador. Emily Rios plays Lucia Villanueva, the daughter of a Mexican crime boss.

This is where the show reaches for its largest claim: that the crack epidemic and Cold War foreign policy were not two stories but one. The premise is set primarily in Los Angeles between 1983 and 1986, and the series wants the CIA thread to explain the supply, the money and the permission behind what happens on the streets.

When it works, it gives the Los Angeles scenes a second floor. When it doesn’t, it plays like a separate show that occasionally shares a title card. The luchador thread in particular takes a long time to earn its place in the collision course the synopsis promises. Peris-Mencheta is fine. The material around him drifts.

The schedule, season by season

“Snowfall” ran on a steady, unglamorous clock. FX ordered a ten-episode first season in September 2016, after the project first began development at Showtime in 2014.

The gap between season three and season four is the one to notice. The third season ended in 2019; the fourth did not arrive until February 24, 2021. That is a long time for a serialized drama to hold an audience, and “Snowfall” came back to a television landscape that had changed around it.

It also came back with a sixth season already promised as the last. FX renewed the show for a sixth and final season in April 2022, and that season premiered on February 22, 2023, with the series finale airing on April 19, 2023.

What the six seasons add up to

Sixty episodes is a real accomplishment and also a real problem. “Snowfall” was never a show that knew how to be small. Every season adds characters, cities, agencies and obligations, and the ensemble grows faster than the writing can service it.

The Los Angeles material is the strongest and the most consistent. The Saint household gives the series a place to return to, and the show uses it well when it remembers to. Jerome and Louie in particular do more with less screen time than several of the larger roles. Cissy is the conscience the series needs and doesn’t always use.

The CIA thread is the show’s thesis and its weakest execution. It is not that the idea is wrong. It is that the idea is stated more often than it is dramatized, and a thesis restated is not a story told.

Where “Snowfall” succeeds is in refusing to make the epidemic a single villain. The show’s synopsis calls it a storm, and the series treats it like weather — something that arrives, that people read too late, that reshapes everything it touches. That framing is more honest than most drug-war television, which prefers a kingpin to a system.

Where it fails is in scale. Six seasons of a show this wide means long stretches where nothing converges, and the promised collision course keeps getting postponed. The final season has to do the work of five, and it shows.

The verdict on Snowfall

“Snowfall” is a good show that wanted to be a great one and reached past its grasp in the wrong direction. Its best asset is its premise: Los Angeles, 1983, the infancy of the crack epidemic, and a family that gets rich building the thing that destroys its own neighborhood. That is a story worth 60 episodes.

Its worst habit is sprawl. The Nicaragua thread, the luchador, the cartel daughter — each is defensible on paper and each costs the show time it could have spent on Franklin Saint, who is the reason to watch and who never quite becomes the reason to stay.

The published critical score of 6.3 out of 10 lands about right. That number reads as faint praise, and faint praise is what “Snowfall” earns: a series with an excellent first idea, a solid cast, a patient sense of place, and a persistent inability to decide which of its many stories it was actually telling. Watch the Los Angeles scenes. Tolerate the rest.

crime drama · Damson Idris · FX · John Singleton · Snowfall · TV Review