Snow falling on palm trees
New series follows ’80s crack epidemic that ravaged streets of South Central L.A.
Snowfall Wednesdays, FX Canada
The new FX series Snowfall opened on a neighbourhood block teeming with vitality in South Central Los Angeles in the summer of 1983. The afternoon sun shimmers through the palm trees. Sprinklers hiss on green lawns. Children congregate around an ice cream truck. The sequence ends with a crane shot that extends above the trees, peering down on a community that teems with vitality.
The series is about getting to the “after” photo, following a crack epidemic that ravaged the streets in short order.
“The opening of the show is the ’hood the way I remember it,” says co-creator John Singleton. “South Central has parts of the ghetto, but it’s beautiful. It’s Los Angeles. There are palm trees. The colours are very vibrant. There are always kids playing in the streets, especially in the spring and summertime. I remember those times as being some of the best times of my life.”
Singleton also recalls the perils of his youth, and how he learned to stay within certain unmarked borders.
“These were very dangerous times for me as a teenager, because they were my formative years. You had people who were just coming into adolescence that were trying to make money and had access to guns. People were very impulsive at the time. The juxtaposition between the beauty and the pathos of the neighbourhood is something I wanted (Snowfall), to show.”
Snowfall represents a homecoming for Singleton, returning to the site of his electrifying 1991 debut feature, Boyz n the Hood, which he made shortly after graduating from film school at the University of Southern California.
At age 24, Singleton was both the youngest person and the first African-American ever nominated for the best-director Oscar.
Snowfall begins with a home invasion the young hero’s powerful father, played by Laurence Fishburne, has to fend off.
Among the show’s diverse cross section of players in the drug trade, Franklin Saint (Damson Idris), could be a character out of Boyz n the Hood. He’s a 19-yearold pot dealer who seizes the opportunity to expand his business but slides down a slippery slope as circumstances challenge his essential decency and distaste for violence.
“He’s not Scarface,” says Singleton. “He’s just a little kid trying to make his way into a business that could kill him at any moment.”
The coarsening of Franklin’s soul gives Snowfall a compelling moral centre, but the show expands into other intersecting worlds, too, including a MexicanAmerican crime family and a CIA operative (Carter Hudson), who tries to use the cocaine trade to funnel assistance to Nicaraguan contras.
Showrunner Dave Andron (Justified) likens the crack epidemic to a bomb being dropped. “I was very surprised to learn that even in 1983, (South Central) was still just a working-class neighbourhood. Everybody I’ve talked to, including John, can attest that things were still relatively OK. By the summer of ’84 ... it was a war zone. How did something turn that violent, that ugly, that quickly?”
Snowfall explores the many facets of that central issue, from the malice and fecklessness of politicians and police to the families and individuals ripped apart by addiction and violence. For Singleton and Andron, it all feeds into a historic continuum of assaults on the black community, of a piece with slavery and Jim Crow laws.
“Had crack not landed, what would have happened?” wonders Andron. “Would that next generation have been more educated, have broken down more barriers? Instead, what we had was the complete opposite, where literally a plague was unleashed on a neighbourhood that probably set that community and others like it around the country back maybe generations. That’s something that was really shattering to me and difficult to get my head around.”
“Crack was kind of like the hammer on the anvil,” Singleton says. “They say crack is the only drug that could make a black woman leave her children.
“Then (the government), created unjust laws to punish small amounts of crack cocaine, as opposed to powder cocaine,” he adds. “We’re not straight pointing the finger at the CIA on the show, but we are saying they looked the other way. It wasn’t like a diabolical plot to destroy the black community, but we know that was the aftereffect.
“I’d like to believe that if any of these people knew what crack ultimately would do, they would choose a different path to better their life. But obviously they, like real people at the time, had no idea what’s coming.”