The Snow has Stopped Falling
Snowfall's culturally significant yet still underrated run ended with the series finale last week. How will it be remembered?
*This column contains spoilers about Snowfall. If you haven’t seen the entirety of the final season, you should save this read for later*
Rarely does a television show get the opportunity to go out on its own terms. Rarely does a show become such an intricate part of the culture. Rarely does a contemporary show introduce us to a wide range of extremely young acting talent. And rarely do we see Black stories told in an unadulterated way.
Snowfall was that rarity, and a couple of weeks ago, the hit FX crime drama came to an end with a depressingly sad but fitting close. Some shows get too cute in their ending, veering so far away from any reasonable artistic consistency or explanation in their series finales and outcomes. (Looking at you, Game of Thrones) Snowfall, however, cemented its status among the pantheon of television classics with a finale that will be discussed for years.
The biggest revelation from the show was the emergence of Damson Idris, who portrayed the show’s protagonist, Franklin Saint, brilliantly. Idris, who is from the United Kingdom, put in the work relentlessly to make the character his own. So many of his epic monologues are etched into my brain for life, and the quirks of his expressions – from the half-hearted smile/smirk to the generational Southern swang in the word “people”, to the friendly pat on the chest when something is obliged – make you think you’re watching your cousin on the screen. (The scene below is by far my most favorite of the series, largely because it sums up quickly who Saint had become, and brilliantly foreshadowed the events of the final two seasons.)
Idris isn’t alone. Amin Joseph as Uncle Jerome, Angela Lewis as Aunt Louie, Gail Bean as Wanda, and Isaiah John as Leon all turn in individual performances that make you love and root for their characters. Even Carter Hudson, who plays CIA-operative Teddy McDonald, deserves his flowers. Illustrating equally the promise and constraints, the opportunity and racism, that America affords Black people has to be an incredible challenge for one person to pull off, and until the end, Hudson delivered perfectly.
What made Snowfall a staple in the culture is good character development and iconic performances. But more than that, Snowfall, from the debut of the pilot on July 5, 2017 to the closing end of its run, centered Black people. The Black characters weren’t ancillary, supplemental or procedural. They were the story. Their realities and their lives are what kept us gravitated for six years.
There’s long been a contingent of the internet willing to trip over their keyboard fingers to argue Snowfall is a better show than The Wire, and while I can’t agree with that, I do see their point.
Objectively, The Wire is a better written production, with far fewer plot holes and a richness to the connectivity of storylines and characters across seasons. But a lot of those differences are owed to its airing on HBO, which produces far less constraints to even modern day cable.
On top of that, despite the mythology that has developed around it in the 15 years since it went off the air, The Wire was not a hugely popular show while it ran. Maybe it would be more impactful and garner a much wider audience in the age of social media, but that we’ll never know.
Most importantly, and the likely reason why Snowfall is more beloved than The Wire (even if it isn’t necessarily better) is because it’s not a cop show. Snowfall has law enforcement as an intricate part in the story’s universe, but never are the life and struggles of a cop the main problem. Even in season three, where the Saints’ LAPD neighbor Andre Wright takes a role closer to center stage, his story is still told primarily in its relation to Franklin, his family and his community.
The Wire, for all of its realism, is primarily about the flaws and creativity of law enforcement officers. It’s a story about Baltimore centering Baltimore’s boys and girls in blue. Everything else builds on that. Sure, the shows creators create a brilliant, episodic adventure over five seasons, where several contributing factors of urban decay like politicians, education and mass media are examined with a telescope of humanity, but intertwined in each season, and in each episode, are police. In The Wire, the incompetence or intelligence of law enforcement is the universal binding ingredient. Full stop.
From the pilot to the ‘Sins of the Father’, Snowfall is about a Black man, it’s about Black people in Los Angeles, and it’s about what America does to Black people every step of the way. It’s poetic, largely because it’s so real, and because, at every turn, it’s about Black men and women simply trying to survive. Raise your hand if you can identify with that.
Even as Franklin went from ambitious young man to ruthless, cutthroat killer, we almost always found ourselves rooting for him, because deep down, we could all see a little of him in ourselves. And that’s what makes his ultimate fate equally saddening and fitting. Franklin had so many outs, and none of those outs got him back to the $73 million that Teddy stole from him, and such, none of the outs, in his estimation, were worth cashing out for.
In the end, Franklin lost his mother to prison, lost his uncle to the game, lost his father to the government, lost his girl and unborn child, and lost the fortune he seemingly lost himself to build. In the series’ final moments, Franklin and Leon go on a walk to the liquor store as Franklin is drunken and dis-shoveled. At the end of their walk back, Franklin loses the house he paid for in cash because of unpaid property taxes. Nothing is ever really yours in America.
As a character, I think Franklin is a cautionary tale to us all, but especially to Black men. It’s an exaltation to consider, truly, what’s important to you, to know what you’re truly willing to die for, and to develop a sense of self mature enough to know what ‘enough’ means for you. No, most of us aren’t drug dealers, but a lot of us can and do lose ourselves trying to (re)cover money, opportunity and people that were either stolen from us or simply left us.
Franklin’s arc is reminiscent of the arc America seeks to bind us to, and by which many of our systems of oppression flourish under. How fitting it is, then, to see Franklin flail into the undesirable universe of alcoholism, just like his dad, after everything he once had at his fingertips. What does it profit a man to gain the whole world but lose his soul?
Snowfall had its holes, but perfection is a difficult fish to catch, so we’ll leave this space free of those criticisms. In the age of social media, binge watching, and streaming, a television show that captures the attention and imagination of a people is a rarity. A show that is unapologetically Black in its truthfulness and ruthlessness in the Black American experience is even rarer. Who knows if this pilot still gets green lit in the landscape of a Trump/Biden America. To me, that’s what makes Snowfall’s run even more miraculous, and why it’s ending invokes an emotional void. At some point in the series, you saw many parts of yourself in characters with deep flaws, deeper ambitions, and the deepest of conflicting challenges. At the end of the day, who can’t relate to that?