Snowfall review: this slick and breezy drama is a mix of Narcos and Boogie Nights
Sin and sunshine make for an engaging cocktail in Snowfall (BBC Two), a splashy tale of feuding gangsters in early Eighties South Central Los Angeles. The series is executive-produced by John Singleton, whose 1991 film Boyz n the Hood is considered the definitive chronicling of the urban African-American experience. Snowfall is far more cartoonish than that hard-punching movie, with street level social realism replaced by a pulpy commitment to spinning a good yarn.
It's 1983 and the overwhelmingly African-American suburb of Compton is about to be struck by a tsunami of violence and death in the form of a crack cocaine epidemic. This real-life social tragedy could have made for a sobering meditation on the dark side of the American dream. But rather than get bogged down in the historical grit, the story has been repurposed by Singleton as a zinging mix of Narcos, Miami Vice and Boogie Nights.
As shiny and gauche as a drug dealer’s Porsche, Snowfall features the obligatory weave of disparate characters and plot-lines (mirroring the structure of David Simon’s just arrived New York Seventies epic The Deuce). There is hustling teenager Franklin Saint – portrayed with a combustible blend of swagger and insecurity by Damson Idris, a young British actor previously seen walking the mean streets of Casualty and Miranda.
Raised poor but educated in a middle-class school, Saint has a rare appreciation of the gulf between the opportunities afforded to African-American and white Angelenos. Cocaine is at this time regarded as a rich kid’s drug. Franklin, however, sees the potential for introducing it to his old neighbourhood by leveraging his friendship with the brattish scion of a San Fernando Valley porn studio (where cocaine flows like spring water).
Less immediately engaging is the plight of down-on-his-luck wrestler Gustavo Zapata (Sergio Peris-Mencheta) who has agreed to served as hired muscle for an ambitious Mexican drugs family. Peris-Mencheta mumbles his way through the first of 10 episodes, while Emily Rios (best known for playing a girlfriend of Jesse Pinkman in Breaking Bad) isn’t, in the opening hour at least, given enough to work with as the cartel’s ambitious new power player.
A third interlocking story centres on CIA agent Teddy McDonald (Carter Hudson), sucked into a cocaine conspiracy that is covertly funding a Latin America insurgency. Hudson excels as the nerdish field operative hoping to rescue his moribund career by flooding Los Angeles with drugs – a nefarious episode in the annals of the CIA already covered this year by the Tom Cruise caper American Made.
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Snowfall didn't quite give FX the critical smash the network had perhaps anticipated when it debuted in the US in July (though it has been renewed for a second season). It’s slick and breezy – far too enamoured with its roguish characters to do justice to a cathartic chapter in the history of modern Los Angeles. But the show has a giddy energy and, amid the blizzard of gangster clichés, Idris shines brightly as star in the making.
