Snowfall (TV Program)

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    Damson Idris Was Raised on ‘Def Comedy Jam’ and Bagel King

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    The star of “Snowfall,” which is kicking off its final season on FX, talks about getting into character with a book about 1980s Los Angeles and why he always feels his best in a tuxedo.The British Nigerian actor Damson Idris can see the connections between his career trajectory and that of Franklin Saint, the character he plays on the FX cocaine saga “Snowfall.”“I came as a kid, and today I’ve got a show under my belt, and I’m meeting new people and there’s a different level of respect that they give me,” said Idris, who was 23 when the show’s creators, including John Singleton (“Boyz N the Hood”), anointed him the lead.“And that happened with Franklin, too,” he said. “He was this pushover kid who was getting beaten up every episode, and he grew into this guy who was running an empire.”So the end of the road was bound to be emotional.Idris, now 31, had just wrapped the sixth and final season and was still riding a wave of euphoria and exhaustion on a video call from his home in Los Angeles. That season begins on Wednesday, picking up a day after the events of the Season 5 finale, after Franklin sees $73 million of his nest egg vanish along with his dreams of a new life and a new wife.Now, with his back against the wall, he’s willing to take out everyone by any means necessary. “The sweet kid has finally turned into the monster,” Idris said.He had planned to take a long break from television after “Snowfall,” he admitted while discussing the first book he read (“I was never a book guy”), the music that moves him and the importance of humility. But then Donald Glover called to discuss his coming series “Swarm,” about an uberfan of a Beyoncé-like pop star, “and I’m like, When do I need to be at work, sir?”These are edited excerpts from the conversation.1‘Young Locs on the Westside’This is actually, embarrassingly enough, the first book that I read. It was given to me by John Singleton, and I used it to understand South L.A. in the ’80s. You follow these kids as they’re transitioning through adolescence to adulthood, and the horrible things that they go through but also the wonderful things that they go through. After I read it, I immediately got into the mentality of Franklin Saint. It helped me get through six seasons.2AmapianoIt’s a subgenre of house music that emerged in South Africa in the mid-2010s, and it doesn’t matter what mood you’re in, you’re going to find your body moving. I tweeted about it last year when I was introduced to it. I said, “If you’re not listening to amapiano music, you’re missing out on life.” There’s a new dance move on TikTok to it every single day. I probably wouldn’t ever do it publicly, but I do it in the house often. My favorite song is “Tanzania” from the D.J. Uncle Waffles. It’s so culturally relevant that artists from Beyoncé to Rihanna are all dabbling.3‘Def Comedy Jam’When I was younger, I’d steal the tapes from my older siblings, wait for them to leave the house and spend all day watching the likes of Martin Lawrence, Chris Tucker, Bernie Mac, Katt Williams, Dave Chappelle. I would impersonate their stand-ups word for word. It was a brilliant party trick for family gatherings, minus the cussing.4FIFA Ultimate TeamI grew up wanting to be a football player. But I remember being 18 and Lionel Messi was 22 at the time. And I was so far behind, talent-wise, to him. He made me quit. [Laughs] The FIFA Ultimate Team is a game mode that’s possibly taken up a third of my life. You are essentially making a super team and then you compete with other people around the world. And till this day, if you lose at FIFA in my friendship circle, you have to give a written and verbal apology to the other person for wasting their time.5Fela Kuti’s ‘Beasts of No Nation’He is so important in Nigerian culture, so important to my family, so important to me. He’s talking about the civil rights of Nigeria of that time and the conflict between the common man and the politics. The song started coming back into my life during George Floyd. I understood the parallels of racism and how it really is a global issue and a pendulum that needed to swing. “Beasts of No Nation” comments on it perfectly.6Mum’s Beef StewI’ve tried a million times to make it, but there’s something I’m missing. Maybe her perfume falls into the soup, and that’s what the missing ingredient is. I would get on a 10-hour flight to London to taste my mother’s cooking and her mix of palm oil, tomatoes, garlic and onion, and then the beef. I hope to get married one day and that beef stew comes with the contract.7Bagel KingIf you grew up in inner-city London, as soon as the party gets shut down, everyone’s going to Bagel King to have a beef patty in buttered cheese-coconut bread and some plantains. It’s a staple in London culture, and it’s housed some of the funniest yet terrifying moments in my life.8‘Liberian Girl’When I was a kid, I remember watching the music video, and it was the first time that I saw a range of artists from different fields. Athletes, musicians, actors, poets — they were all in the same video, all paying homage to the greatest performer of all time. I became infatuated with Hollywood. I said, “I wish I was in that room.”9‘The Black Godfather’This documentary follows the life of Clarence Avant. It dives into the genesis of Black Hollywood and how there was one man behind it all, lurking in the shadows, that was pulling the strings and introducing some of the most amazing people of all time to each other — which then led to greatness. It was incredibly inspirational because it taught me that regardless of the problems that I may face on this journey — the ups and downs, which will inevitably come — those things will not matter as long as you have friends, as long as you’re a good person, as long as you walk in humility.10TuxedosWhen I was 4 or 5, for my birthday my mother would put me in these cute little tuxedo suits. All my friends would be dressed down in their tracksuits, their Reebok classics — here I was in a full-on suit, like I was about to get married. And then my sister would put me in the same suit and force me to marry her doll, who was my height. The doll’s name was Wendy, and she had a string that you could pull that would say “I love you.” It was the first person that said “I love you” to me after my mom. So I fell in love with tuxedos very early. And today I always say a tuxedo makes me feel I’m at my greatest level of excellence. More

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      ‘Snowfall’ Review: To Live, Love and Die in 1980s L.A.

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      FX’s sharply etched, powerfully nostalgic and entirely under-the-radar drama about a family cocaine empire begins its fifth season.“Snowfall,” FX’s South Los Angeles cocaine saga, eased onto the television schedule in July 2017, and since then it’s gone about its business quietly. It doesn’t get talked about a lot, but its fifth season arrives with two episodes on Wednesday. That’s a good run for an astringent morality tale that doesn’t offer predictable thrills, excessive sentimentality or brand-name actors.Which isn’t to say that “Snowfall” doesn’t do some discreet pandering to its audience. It is, in its vicious way, one of the most powerfully nostalgic shows on television — a “Wonder Years” for the drug trade. Its picture of Los Angeles in the mid-1980s may not be realistic in the strict sense, but it’s true to an idea of the city at that time as promulgated by John Singleton, one of the show’s creators, and the show allies itself with that mythos in clever ways. When the family at the story’s center goes ballistic in the new season after a neighborhood rapper rhymes about their business, a light goes on in the eyes of one of the crew: It’s 1986, and he sees gangsta rap coming.Singleton, who died in 2019, was in Los Angeles developing the screenplay for his first and best-known film, “Boyz N The Hood,” at the time that the new season of “Snowfall” takes place. When he was nominated for an Oscar for directing the film, he was 24, the age the hero of the show, the precocious drug dealer Franklin Saint (Damson Idris), reaches in Season 5. “Snowfall” borrows some tragic-young-men archetypes from “Boyz,” and their melodramatic pull is another ingredient in the show’s appeal.But “Snowfall” has taken a cooler and more understated approach — the romanticism and sensationalism are there, but they’re moderated by dry humor, on one hand, and an effective calibration of cold dread, on the other. (Dave Andron, another creator of the series, remains the showrunner and wrote the new season’s first two episodes with Leonard Chang; four of 10 episodes were available for review.) Rather than a rueful tragedy, it is — so far — a Horatio Alger tale of aspirational capitalism, one that adds systemic racism and automatic weapons to the barriers facing the hero.And although it didn’t start out as a wry and moving family drama, it has evolved into one. The plot strands that followed the internal workings of a Mexican drug cartel and the Central American adventures of the rogue C.I.A. agent Reed (Carter Hudson) have dropped away, and the focus is entirely on Franklin and his tight-knit crew: his uncle Jerome (Amin Joseph); Jerome’s girlfriend, Louie (Angela Lewis); his best friend and right-hand man, Leon (Isaiah John); and his mother, Cissy (Michael Hyatt).And it’s those performers, finally, who are the show’s almost-secret weapon. Presumably directed over the seasons to underplay, they’ve consistently worked against any temptation to resort to clichéd gestures and emotions. The central cast, led by Idris as the dangerously conflicted, reluctantly menacing Franklin, has created a quirky and believable gallery of characters, and their emotional credibility keeps you invested through the story’s melodramatic twists and abrupt turns. (The portrayal of the actual drug business, and the fictionalized treatment of the C.I.A.’s involvement with it, is not, it’s safe to say, documentary in nature.)Season 4 ended (spoilers ahead) in a welter of chaos and violence: Franklin and Reed’s partnership was nearly exposed by a reporter; Reed killed the reporter but was then partially outed anyway by Franklin’s father, who in turn was (perhaps) killed by Reed. As Season 5 opens, Franklin has apparently put it all behind him. He’s on top of his game, piloting his own airplane and running his semi-legitimate real estate company with his new girlfriend, Veronique (Devyn A. Tyler of “Clarice”), who’s pregnant.But success is the handmaiden of disaster on “Snowfall” — the perverse reality of Franklin’s American dream is that the wealthier and happier your family becomes, the more ruthless and paranoid you need to be to protect it. The death of the real-life basketball star Len Bias means that the public, and law enforcement, suddenly begin to pay more attention to cocaine. Closer to home, life is complicated by the return of Reed (now going by his real name, Teddy), who’s quickly back in the C.I.A.’s good graces, and of Cissy, who wants to know why her son is back in business with his father’s killer.None of this can end well, it would seem, but it’s a dark, enjoyable, sharply etched ride in the meantime. “Snowfall” is partly about the collateral damage of true belief — the destruction wrought when Reed’s obsessive patriotism hooks up with Franklin’s implacable determination to succeed. But as the battles play out, there’s always love and the pull of friendship down in the trenches. More

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      The Best TV Episodes of 2021

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      Among the thousands of hours of television that came out this year, episodes of “Call My Agent,” “For All Mankind,” “Mythic Quest,” “Pose” and “WandaVision,” among others, stood out.From left, “Dave,” PEN15” and “Genius: Aretha” put out some of TV’s best episodes of the year.From left: Byron Cohen/FX; Hulu; Richard DuCree/National GeographicTelevision today comes in big portions, as anyone who spent seven-plus hours with the Beatles over Thanksgiving weekend can attest. But just as a marathon jam session can yield a few tight singles, the most memorable TV is still often the well-crafted individual episode. As Mike Hale, Margaret Lyons and I end another year’s binge as TV critics for The New York Times, here are a few of the installments from 2021 that topped our personal hit parades. JAMES PONIEWOZIK‘Call My Agent!’ (Netflix)‘Sigourney’More than 30 European actors — including stars like Isabelle Huppert, Juliette Binoche and Jean Reno — have graciously and often mercilessly lampooned themselves in this French dramedy, playing clients or prospective clients or angry former clients of the fictional talent agency ASK. In this Season 4 episode, an American stepped in, and Sigourney Weaver, speaking more than passable French and playing herself as an utterly charming manipulator, was flawless. (Streaming on Netflix.) MIKE HALE‘City of Ghosts’‘Bob & Nancy’Plenty of children’s shows are cute but “City of Ghosts” is also beautiful, and its poetic wistfulness about Los Angeles would be at home on a premium cable drama. Instead it’s in this plucky, naturalistic cartoon about ghost-hunting kids who have a podcast. I loved every episode of this show. But I picked “Bob & Nancy” because it’s about a marionette theater, and thus it toys with ideas of animating the inanimate — rich ground for a show in touch with the spirit realm. (Streaming on Netflix.) MARGARET LYONSHarley Quinn Smith in the finale of “Cruel Summer,” which offered both a happy ending and a surprising twist.Freeform/Bill Matlock‘Cruel Summer’‘Hostile Witness’This teen kidnapping mystery took all the hallmarks of prestige-y crime shows — split timelines, dark lighting, tangential secrets — and repackaged them with a kicky ’90s YA flare. It was one of the juicy highlights of the summer. But shows like this are only as good as their finales, and “Cruel Summer” managed the trick of both a happy ending and a thrilling, dark twist. (Streaming on Hulu.) MARGARET LYONS‘Dave’ (FXX)‘Somebody Date Me’Texting can be a crutch for TV shows, a way to use pop-up bubbles to give characters phone-enabled telepathy. Not so in this playful, smart half-hour, in which Dave Burd’s up-and-coming rapper made (and lost) a date with Doja Cat. As the two musicians courted with their thumbs, “Somebody Date Me” showed how context and time can change the meaning and reading of the smallest online (mis)communication. Thumbs-up emoji! (Streaming on Hulu.) JAMES PONIEWOZIKThe Season 2 finale of “For All Mankind,” with Krys Marshall, revolved around multiple white-knuckle missions.Apple TV+‘For All Mankind’ (Apple TV+)‘The Grey’Each season of this space-race alternative history is a multistage booster rocket. The slow-moving early episodes expend a lot of fuel, building energy and narrative force until the show reaches escape velocity. (My aerospace engineer readers, I beg you not to fact-check my metaphors.) The white-knuckle Season 2 finale moved with the deftness of a docking maneuver, as a U.S.-Soviet conflict on the moon and a threatened war on Earth required risk and sacrifice on two celestial bodies and points in between. (Streaming on Apple TV+.) JAMES PONIEWOZIK‘Genius: Aretha’ (National Geographic)‘Amazing Grace’‘Pose’ (FX)‘Take Me to Church’The music and community of the Black church co-starred in two praiseworthy hours of TV. The Aretha Franklin bio-series peaked as it focused on the recording of the 1972 “Amazing Grace” live album at New Temple Missionary Baptist Church, fusing the artist’s past and present in a crucible of soul. In “Pose,” a grim diagnosis led Pray Tell (Billy Porter) back to his hometown and church community, both to confront the homophobia that drove him from it and give voice to the music that sustained him. (Stream “Genius: Aretha” on Hulu; buy “Pose” on Amazon.) JAMES PONIEWOZIKPerry Mattfeld, left, and David Webster, in the “Somewhere Over the Border” episode of “In the Dark.” CW‘In the Dark’ (CW)‘Somewhere Over the Border’This CW drama about a blind woman and her buddies, who run a rescue-dog agency and get involved in drug dealing and murder, is no more than a serviceable thriller. But the rapport among its central characters, Murphy (Perry Mattfeld), Jess (Brooke Markham) and Felix (Morgan Krantz), has developed into one of the more believable and moving portrayals of friendship on TV. When Murphy found herself stranded in a strange country, the strength of those ties was the foundation of a taut and agonizing hour. (Streaming on Netflix.) MIKE HALE‘Line of Duty’ (BritBox)Season 6, Episode 5Tension and deception pump through the veins of this breakneck procedural about a British internal-affairs unit, and no show does cliffhangers better. You could point to just about any episode; this one, with one of the heroes following a possibly dirty cop into an abandoned industrial park because that’s what the job called for, was off the charts. (Streaming on BritBox.) MIKE HALE‘Love, Death & Robots’‘The Drowned Giant’In just 13 minutes, this elegant short about a giant’s corpse that washes up on a beach one day captures, in a perfect snapshot, humanity’s tendency to desecrate marvels, to behold a world-changing event and decide simply to carry on. Based on a short story by J.G. Ballard, “The Drowned Giant” is rendered here in mostly realistic animation, with the giant’s clean-shaven cheeks, tidy fingernails and muscular chest shown in aching detail. In an era when so many shows just blend together, this episode stands out for its light touch and sad imagination. (Streaming on Netflix.) MARGARET LYONSIn a memorable episode of “Making It,” contestants like Jessie Lamworth, (right, with the host Amy Poehler) made Halloween costumes.Evans Vestal Ward/NBC‘Making It’‘All the Holidays at Once’Post “Great British Baking Show,” lots of reality competition series have gone away from the cutthroat in favor of the warm and fuzzy, and perhaps no show is warmer and fuzzier than the craft competition “Making It.” Each episode has its charms but “All the Holidays at Once” was especially thrilling, because unlike some of the show’s grander projects, crafting your own Halloween costume is pretty standard fare, even for layfolk. The contestants’ giddy joy in presenting their creations to the judges was matched only by my own giddy joy at seeing their silly and spectacular costumes. Jess won with her superb alien-abduction costume but when everything is this fun, don’t we all win? As a bonus, this episode also included Melañio telling a story about a bat in a toilet, a tale that will haunt me for the rest of my days. (Streaming on Hulu.) MARGARET LYONS‘Mythic Quest’ (Apple TV+)‘Backstory!’Having come up with one of the best pandemic-inspired episodes of 2020, this video game-industry comedy is gunning for TV’s high score in stand-alones. This installment gave the back story-obsessed game writer C.W. Longbottom (a wonderfully blustery F. Murray Abraham) his own flashback as a struggling sci-fi author in the 1970s — a funny and poignant tale of irony, professional jealousy and success at a cost. (Streaming on Apple TV+.) JAMES PONIEWOZIK‘Nuclear Family’ (HBO)Episode 3Ry Russo-Young’s three-part documentary about her lesbian mothers and the sperm donor who sued them for parental rights, threatening to pull apart her family, built to a powerful and eloquent conclusion. It both affirmed the importance of the battle her mothers fought and questioned the assumptions of everyone involved. (Streaming on HBO Max.) MIKE HALEIn a March interview with Oprah Winfrey, Prince Harry and Meghan Markle discussed their separation from the royal family.Harpo Productions/Joe Pugliese‘Oprah with Meghan and Harry’One so rarely gets to receive or send a “turn on your TV right now” text, especially in my line of work. So for that dual thrill alone this interview earned a place in my heart. It was the kind of programming that barely exists anymore: a tell-all network special in which celebrities share genuine new information with Oprah, the patron saint of soul-baring. There were Prince Harry and Meghan Markle, aglow in the California sun, decrying racism and candidly discussing mental health crises. Which would have been enough, but they also reset the royal narrative, gave Oprah eggs, fought back tears and gazed lovingly at one another — all while sitting in chairs sold by Christopher Knight from “The Brady Bunch.” Television, baby! I love you! MARGARET LYONS‘PEN15’ (Hulu)‘Yuki’Mutsuko Erskine had never acted before her daughter, Maya, cast her to play Maya’s mother in Hulu’s brutally funny teen comedy. Sometimes daughter knows best. This showpiece episode, in which a chance meeting with an ex-husband led Yuki to look down a road not taken, was a rich vignette of an immigrant’s experience and a subtle performance to cap off the role, literally, of a lifetime. (Streaming on Hulu.) JAMES PONIEWOZIK‘The Simpsons’ (Fox)‘The Dad-Feelings Limited’Who would have thought that the origin story of Comic Book Guy, done partly as an affectionate sendup of a Wes Anderson film, would be so lovely? (Streaming on Disney+.) MIKE HALE‘Snowfall’ (FX)‘All the Way Down’This brutal and only-as-sentimental-as-it-needs-to-be drama about a rogue C.I.A. agent and a young Black entrepreneur, partners in the crack wars in early 1980s Los Angeles, still does not get enough attention. That’s especially true of the stories written by the novelist Walter Mosley, like this chilling, tightly packed episode about rage, revenge, gentrification and wanting to go straight. (Streaming on Hulu.) MIKE HALEIn “WandaVision,” Paul Bettany and Elizabeth Olsen channeled multiple eras of TV including, in the premiere, 1950s sitcoms.Marvel Studios‘WandaVision’ (Disney+)‘Filmed Before a Live Studio Audience’Several installments of this superhero psychodrama, set in a bizarro-world version of classic sitcom formats, could have made this list. But might as well start at the beginning, in which Wanda (Elizabeth Olsen) and Vision (Paul Bettany) played house on a 1950s stage set whose made-for-TV perfection turned horrifyingly (and ingeniously) wrong. (Streaming on Disney+.) JAMES PONIEWOZIK‘What We Do in the Shadows’‘Casino’“Shadows” is one of the funniest shows on TV right now, and “Casino,” where the gang heads to Atlantic City, was my favorite episode this season. Nandor (Kayvan Novak) becomes entranced by a “Big Bang Theory” slot machine — “‘bazinga’ is the war cry of Sheldon,” he explains — and in perfect, cascading horror, this leads to the total dissolution of his understanding of the universe. “Shadows” is its best when the vampires’ grandiosity clashes with their vulnerabilities, especially their excitability, and I’ll never see another in-house ad on a hotel TV without thinking that it’s Colin Robinson’s favorite show. (Streaming on Hulu.) MARGARET LYONS More