Review: FX’s ‘Snowfall’ Dramatizes an Origin Story for Crack Cocaine

Photo

Where would golden-age TV be without drugs? Illicit substances have served shows almost like characters, each with its own circumstances and even personality: heroin in “The Wire,” meth in “Breaking Bad,” marijuana in “Weeds,” bootleg hooch in “Boardwalk Empire.”

“Snowfall,” which begins Wednesday on FX, aims to write an origin story for crack cocaine, which spread virally in the 1980s, and to invest viewers in the lives that it changed or ended. Over the first six episodes, though, it doesn’t yet get around to the first goal, and it manages the second only now and then.

Created by John Singleton, along with Eric Amadio and Dave Andron, “Snowfall” sets up a sprawling story. (That’s what drug dramas do; they sprawl.) The first and most compelling part kicks off in June 1983, the camera swooping down on a palm-tree-lined street in South Central Los Angeles, the turf of Mr. Singleton’s 1991 movie, “Boyz N the Hood.”

We meet Franklin Saint (Damson Idris), a level-headed kid fresh out of a fancy suburban school he attended on scholarship. At school, there was no place for him — he felt like “a mascot” — so he’s working at a convenience store and doing small-time dealing. When chance connects him with Avi Drexler (Alon Moni Aboutboul), an Israeli coke kingpin with gleaming gold-rimmed shades and a necklace, gun and phone to match, Franklin gets a dangerous opportunity to apply his ambition.

Despite the heavy themes, there’s a lightness to the beginning of “Snowfall,” a sense that this is the calm before the blizzard. Franklin good-naturedly busts neighborhood kids for stealing candy from a truck, and hangs out with Leon Simmons (Isaiah John), just out of juvenile hall. There are the seeds, as in “Boyz,” of a kind of coming-of-age tragedy, as Franklin must decide if he’s a hard enough man to deal the hard stuff.

But “Snowfall” quickly moves elsewhere. There’s a geopolitical thread, in which Teddy McDonald (Carter Hudson), a down-and-out C.I.A. agent, tries to kick-start his career by making a deal to import coke to fund the contra rebels in Nicaragua. A third, underdeveloped story involves Lucia Villanueva (Emily Rios), the daughter of a Mexican drug lord seeking to expand her family’s territory, and Gustavo Zapata (Sergio Peris-Mencheta), a soft-spoken wrestler she takes on as muscle.

The three story lines briefly intersect in the show’s first hour, then meander apart. Like FX’s “The Bridge” (in which Ms. Rios stood out) or the British “Traffik,” “Snowfall” wants to capture a criminal panorama. If there’s a common thread, it’s that each story involves a morally conflicted person in a business that rewards the ruthless, convincing him- or herself that he or she can get just dirty enough to succeed, but no more.

We know how well that usually goes. We know very, very much about how all these stories go, which is a problem. The distinctive aspect of “Snowfall” — the shift from the toot-toot-beep-beep disco era of powder cocaine to the amped-up devastation of crack — is slow in coming, like winter in “Game of Thrones.”

And much of what occupies us early is grim and familiar. There are the requisite partyers snarfing coke up their nostrils (and other orifices). There’s the numbing violence of the sociopaths the business attracts.

It’s fine for a story of broad scope to take its time setting the table, but it needs to hook you on character in the meantime. Only Franklin’s story really does, and that’s almost entirely on the strength of Mr. Idris’s controlled charisma.

Michael Hyatt is strong in a supporting role as Franklin’s mother, who pays the bills working for a slumlord, and there are fine but brief appearances by Kevin Carroll (“The Leftovers”) and Bokeem Woodbine (“Fargo”). Avi, meanwhile, is really probably too broad a character for this show, but his brassy flair amid so much gloomy earnestness is like water in the desert.

The high point so far comes in the fourth episode, directed by Hiro Murai (“Atlanta”), when Franklin and Leon deal with the ugly aftermath of some business gone wrong. It’s a little darkly comic, like the “Pine Barrens” escapade from “The Sopranos,” but it’s also sad: We see just enough of the spark in these young men to mourn it in advance.

This is the kind of effect “Snowfall” has only sometimes, when it pauses from telling the story of a drug and connects with the stories of people.