Critic Reviews

Snowfall is lean, mean and precise. Though it fictionalizes and chronicles a depressing (and violent) American crisis, it belongs on everyone’s must-watch list this summer.

With season five, the show seems to be taking some steps forward—maturing, resetting some relationships and setting up some difficult moral choices for these characters as the season rolls on. Snowfall just feels different this time around, as it shifts gears and focuses not on getting power, but how one might hold on to it when the whole landscape is changing.

While the particulars of the conflict matter less than the emotions and ideas underpinning them, the balance that is stuck ensures the series remains a strong one. Whenever the dust settles on this collapsing empire, both the one Franklin has built and America itself, the tragedy of Snowfall is shaping up to be as potent as the delicate craft on display from all involved.

A program with intriguing characters that tell a taught and engrossing story, Snowfall is a promising new FX series.

The first two episodes of the final season suggest that these characters, no matter how much they fight against their circumstances, are trapped by powers and structures so much stronger than them. It's bleak and violent, and it's totally compelling TV.

The good news is that Snowfall, the searing FX drama about the 1980s crack cocaine epidemic in Los Angeles, does start moving at dazzling speed after a slow, plodding start. The bad news is that this occurs somewhere about the fourth episode.

The most striking thing about Snowfall, though, is that it never seems less exciting, less special, than when it’s doing the standard Scorsese/Tarantino thing and putting groups of treacherous men (and a few women) at cross purposes, then watching them threaten and bluff each other until the guns come out (or don’t).

At its worst, this is a still-not-quite-there prestige drama, but at its best and most interesting, it plays like a very solid 1980s B movie, the kind that young filmmakers and critics would have discovered two decades after it came and went, then scrambled to remake.

Snowfall gets dark but the producers use its tensions to grip the audiences as opposed to oppressing us. Franklin and the people he loves may be on their way to a hard fall from the clouds, but as this new season begins, the trip is fascinating.

As much as the series relentlessly depicts the struggle against poverty and the skewed impact on money and dominance at all cost, “Snowfall” never fails to crackle with an intensity and intellect palpably lacking in most of the season’s schedule at the moment.