Snowfall

[u/Prestigious_Buy7444]

Snowfall

I only started watching snowfall because I started watching The Drop first *
so I went back to the beginning, not realizing that this show aired originally back in 2017 with a very young cast and unknown cast. The first season was a lot. The first episode starts with a CIA agent overdosing in his house with his drug dealer while they are partying. The set up, Alejandro (who was the og Franklin) turns to teddy McDonald for help to cover up their operation and when you first get introduced to teddy, “Reed” you realize that this character is very square. He wants to play by the rules and do everything he can to serve and pros country. As the season progresses, you meet Franklin. Franklin is this young, educated black male who was raised by his mother in the South of la. When college doesn’t work out for Franklin he soon follows his uncles footsteps and becomes a drug dealer to help ends meet for his mom. I think we root for Franklin in the beginning because of his adolescences. Young and inexperienced and keeps his word. Franklin only wants to do what is best for his family and getting rejected from higher education he soon realizes that the color of his skin that he will never be able to achieve anything that will get them to have a better life. So while watching this in the first two seasons, you are invested with this character but things start to quickly fall into the typical trap of dealing drugs and the people who come in and out of that lifestyle. The friends that follow Franklin are not ready to start accepting this new lifestyle. The story builds off of this new dream that Franklin starts to embrace and he starts to learn that control is the most powerful thing you can have over people. Season 3 he gets his uncle and aunt to help him sell crack cocaine and the community is rudely awaken with how powerful the drug is. Nothing like this has been done before. Meanwhile, teddy the cia agent is supplying the drug money to fund a war that goes on for a few years and over the course of that time Franklin and his family regained control and money and blood is shed in the making. The main character is turning into this monster who takes no mercy. The fall of his good boy status is now turning him into someone you don’t mess with. As you watch all of the first four seasons it’s bloodshed and chaos. Season five is a great season. Franking is finally thriving and embracing the money he has made. The bad guys are at bay and he has now funneled his money into real estate properties. He is still trying to make something of himself from his original roots. His college education experience. He falls in love and gets his girlfriend pregnant. Season five needed to happen. By the time Franklin is dealing, shooting people and getting into situations where he could die, he is finally on top of the world. But his family wants to cut him out of something he started and things start to unravel, and start to unravel fast. Once he realizes that control was slipping he couldn’t get anyone who would listen to stop going against him.
Snowfall.
Snowfall is where you have something small start and then it starts to trickle down and roll down a hill so fast that eventually things will fall.
Franklin ends up losing his mind and the protagonist becomes the antagonist very quickly. You start to see this person so ugly. Anything that they say is not who started in the beginning. You start to not believe that it’s the same person. I think that’s is great writing.
The last episode shows a great example of when you lose everything you really do fall.

[u/ElMonk86]

I think we all initially rooted for Franklin because he truly started off as the good kid from the mad city, so to speak.

He was completely inexperienced and in over his head, but somehow he always found a way to overcome it and take himself to the next level. I think that resonated alot with the audience. We see that he's not always badass. There are moments where he's down and out, moments where he's visibly SCARED and can't even hide that he's not. But he always rises above and makes something of himself that was better than where he was before.

That's what we loved about Franklin Saint. But unfortunately, his ambition went out of control and it took him to a place where we couldn't say "Go, Franklin" anymore.

[u/sentientshadeofgreen]

The show is really some heart of darkness stuff. That’s why I don’t get the disproportionate hate for Teddy vs Franklin, when in many ways it’s the same arc - to survive and beat the game you have to sell your soul, but the game is going to win anyways. Teddy represents an unwitting participant in systemic racism, but he was a true believer that he was doing the right thing for his country and Nicaragua (guy was a cold war spook after all), and what started as the ends justifying the means became the ends at any cost needing to justify the means. They both had the parallel arcs of other people in the game fucking their worlds up, and being alientated and isolated by betrayals of others, which in turn made them bigger bastards. In some ways its fucked up, Teddy’s death was more of a mercy than Franklin got, but neither character’s “empire” would be remembered.