As Snowfall returns to FX (and Hulu) for its sixth and final season, the 1980s crime saga from creators John Singleton, Eric Amadio, and Dave Andron is coming off its most-watched run yet, a season that saw the bonds of family at the heart of young Franklin Saint’s drug empire tested, then twisted, and finally totally broken. Now begins the fallout. “What happens in the next few weeks is gonna determine the course of the rest of our lives…”
Opening Shot: Shots of South Central in the morning. “It’s early here in Los Angeles,” says the DJ on the radio, “and it is anybody’s guess who’s gonna get killed tonight.” And over footage of President Reagan and Nancy Reagan, we hear the first lady delivering a speech. “There’s a drug and alcohol abuse epidemic in this country and no one’s safe from it. Not you, not me, and certainly not our children.”
The Gist: Franklin Saint (Damson Idris) had big dreams to get out of the drug game, to use the proceeds from his perch at the top of The Family to fuel a legit life alongside his girlfriend Veronique (Devyn A. Tyler), who is pregnant with their child. But that was before bent former CIA operative Teddy McDonald (Carter Hudson) cleaned out his accounts to the tune of $70 million, a move that also opened a rift between Franklin and his former partners, Uncle Jerome (Amin Joseph) and Jerome’s wife Louanne “Louie” Saint (Angela Lewis). Snowfall season six begins with Franklin sitting on millions in cash and coke he stole from Jerome and Louie as recompense, looking to launder the money through cooperative Miami banks with the help of Veronique, and contacting his former partners’ customers with cut-rate deals on bricks of coke.
As you’d imagine, none of this sits well with Jerome and Louie, whose operation has taken a hit in its liquidity and logistics. And when Louie sets up a coke buy with Teddy and his associate Gustavo (Sergio Peris-Mencheta), McDonald is dismayed to learn of the factional strife within The Family, because it won’t make his effort to find an on-ramp back into the CIA any easier. Teddy is also threatened by Lior (Ariel Eliaz), an enforcer for departed Israeli drug lord Avi Drexler (Alon Aboutboul), and remains unaware of Gustavo playing his own cards from both sides of the deck.
It’ll take more than the stolen boodle to right Franklin’s financial ship, and that’s where his mother Cissy (Michael Hyatt) comes in. She’s brokering a deal with Ruben (Alejandro Edda), a Cuban spy with connections to the KGB, to link up with Franklin’s operation for both financial and material support and a means of avenging Teddy’s theft of all his money. And despite what he said before – “I will not go to war against my own blood” – the aggressive moves Jerome makes in the streets certainly suggest he’s come around to the idea.
What Shows Will It Remind You Of? With its ’80s setting and the looming shadow of the US government’s involvement in the international drug trade, there are more than a few parallels between Snowfall and Narcos. And for a different perspective on the many personalities and facets of drug trafficking, there’s Narco-Saints, a character-driven Netflix series about an enterprising Korean man who becomes embroiled in a Suriname-based smuggling scheme.
Our Take: With each change of setting in Snowfall’s Season 6 return, you expect guns blazing, or at least the promise of more violence. And while it doesn’t quite happen that way, it’s obvious as the series sets up each of its intersecting final season storylines that nobody’s hands are clean. Everybody has an ask, a demand, something they want. And all of these players are operating beyond the limits of what they might have once abided by. The limits are totally gone, and the bonds of family are no longer any kind of safe harbor. Everyone is looking out for numero uno.
Not even Franklin’s relationship with Veronique is safe from suspicion. In a terrific later scene, she arrives on the LAX tarmac, dressed to the nines and ready to take Saint’s stolen millions to Miami for cleaning. “I love you,” he tells her; “Yeah, you do.” And we’re left to wonder along with Franklin: is she working an angle, too? All of this suspicion and continuous threat of violence makes Snowfall an unsettling, utterly compelling watch, since it’s removed its own set of guarantees. Jerome and Louie seem to be acting as one, but there’s still some questioning there. Cissy is connecting Franklin with Ruben and the KGB, and while her outrage over how the American government has treated Black people is entirely valid, it also feels limiting in a more immediate context. (In fairness to Cissy, we know more about Ruben’s activities than she does.) And Teddy is still out here making his own moves, most of which assure a confrontation with Franklin. If Snowfall isn’t yet spinning out of control, it’s definitely agitating for chaos. As Louie says to Teddy about the dust-up with Franklin, the Saints will not be sitting together at Christmas dinner.
Sex and Skin: Nothing in the first episode.
Parting Shot: After Franklin ignored his repeated pages, and finally told him to bring it on, Jerome has begun to make moves at recouping what his nephew stole. And that doesn’t bode well for Dallas (Taylor Polidore) and Black Diamond (Christine Horn), Franklin’s personal enforcers, whose BMW is pulled over in a bogus traffic stop orchestrated by Jerome and former LAPD officer Buckley (Brandon Jay McLaren).
Sleeper Star: The Snowfall cast is uniformly strong, but Angela Lewis is a continual standout as Louie. Lewis plays her as a woman who sometimes seems to understand the multiple dimensions to familial relationships better than the rest of the Saints, a talent that’s even more important when everybody in the family is also enmeshed in a violent criminal enterprise.
Most Pilot-y Line: “This isn’t what I signed up for.” At first, Veronique is not having Franklin’s power-up move on Jerome and Louie’s criminal assets. “You were supposed to be out. Now, I’ve worked so hard to leave my old life behind me. But you’re standing here asking me to go launder millions of dollars in stolen drug money?” It’s this initial pushback that later makes Franklin suspicious when Veronique is suddenly more cooperative.
Our Call: STREAM IT. Everybody in Snowfall is after somebody else, trying to protect what’s theirs while leaning heavily on the old adage of “it’s business, nothing personal.” In Snowfall’s final episodes, it’s pretty clear that the line between what can be called either of those will be utterly obliterated.
Johnny Loftus is an independent writer and editor living at large in Chicagoland. His work has appeared in The Village Voice, All Music Guide, Pitchfork Media, and Nicki Swift. Follow him on Twitter: @glennganges