Billed as a story about the L.A. origins of crack cocaine, FX’s engaging yet depressing 10-episode drama “Snowfall” (premiering Wednesday) is really about the many ways in which the drug trade recalibrates and eventually rots the morals of the people who engage in it.
This is a theme that “Snowfall” and nearly all such drug-supply sagas in film and television have in common, asking a viewer to relate to the conflicted, all-too-human and ultimately murderous choices that get easier and easier to make when the deals go down, the money flows and the triggers are pulled.John Singleton, the “Boyz N the Hood” director who is “Snowfall’s ” co-creator (with Dave Andron and Eric Amadio), opens the series with a Technicolor paean to his South Central neighborhood as he remembers (or imagines) it to be in the summer of 1983, before the rise of crack: a tranquil setting serenaded by R&B and early rap songs that pulse from boomboxes, a world filled with boundless sunshine, good neighbors and ice-cream trucks.
It’s here, with this blissful “before” shot, that “Snowfall” — which I’ve already given strong praise in my summer TV preview based on its lean and well-paced storytelling — could most use a disclaimer or some sort of helpful caution that you should view the series entirely as a work of fiction.
Not “based on.” Not “almost true” and often not anywhere near truth, except in the way that make-believe can achieve a convincing verisimilitude. “Snowfall” needs to come clean as a story, and not because it treats South Central as a paradise on the precipice of being lost (because surely, to some, it was).
Of “Snowfall’s” three parallel story lines, the one most in need of a disclaimer, I think, is a plot that all but connects the emergence of crack to a supposed CIA effort to sell drugs to raise money to buy arms for Central American rebels trying to overthrow communist regimes.That’s an old — and largely debunked — claim, which “Snowfall” presents in great detail as an open-ended matter of controversy. In addition to introducing viewers to an entrepreneurial young man in South Central named Franklin Saint (Damson Idris) who will go from small-time marijuana dealer to becoming the neighborhood’s first crack kingpin, “Snowfall” zeros in on a semi-rogue CIA agent, Teddy McDonald (Carter Hudson), who is still stinging from an earlier mission failure and now acts on indirect orders to deliver arms to Nicaraguans, using a cocaine surplus to raise cash. (Or something like that….
The post ‘Snowfall’ is compelling and believable — which is why it could use a disclaimer appeared first on FeedBox.