An ’80s epic starts a compelling (and final) season

Eight years ago, an unknown English actor met a well-known American producer-director-writer.
Damson Idris had done a few plays, a few TV episodes, one movie; he knew nothing about the chaotic 1980s era in South Central Los Angeles. John Singleton knew everything about it.
They ate Jamaican food in South Central and talked. And then? “He waited for me to get home,” Idris told the Television Critics Association, “before calling me and telling me, ‘Hey, you got the part.’”
That’s the lead role in “Snowfall” (shown here with Idris), the fierce and compelling drama starting its sixth and final season. Its first two episodes – 10 and 11:11 p.m. Wednesday (Feb. 22) on FX, then going to Hulu – conclude with a sensational scene pitting Idris (as Franklin) against Amin Joseph (as Jerome, his uncle).
Getting there was complicated. The first pilot film was ditched and the project took a year for reworking. Later, before the third season aired, Singleton had a stroke and died at 51.
“This is all his legacy,” said showrunner Dave Andron, who created the series with Singleton and Eric Amadio. “He started his career telling about South Central, about his neighborhood.”
Singleton set the first season in 1983. Back then, he was 15; like Franklin, he was a college-bound kid in a middle-income home, in a neighborhood that would soon be transformed by drugs.
The fictional Franklin soon became a drug kingpin; the real-life Singleton graduated from film school in 1990 and the next year made “Boyz n the Hood.” He received Academy Award nominations for his script and his direction – the youngest person (24) and first Black to get the latter nomination.
A quarter-century later, Singleton revisited the turf with “Snowfall.” When the first pilot was scrapped, Idris retreated to London and dug in.
“I just kind of immersed myself in the world,” he recalled. “I watched every single movie. I listened to the music. I listened to … what people were going through, and it was very similar to where I came from in London – a pack of fatherless kids, drugs in the neighborhood, police brutality.”
He was ready to become Franklin, including some sharp detours. “Something that surprised me about Franklin was going against family,” he said. At first “he constantly put family first.”
By the end of last season, all of that had faded. Enraged when a CIA agent stole his fortune, Franklin struck: He killed two guards and stole millions from Jerome, the uncle who had been his father figure.
That led to the sensational scene at the end of the second episode. Jerome and Franklin are in a diner, seething with words, passion and a gun.
“It’s about where your loyalties lay,” Joseph said about Jerome. “I have a new wife that I bring into the family, and I’m pitted against my own nephew, my own flesh and blood …. It’s tragtic; it’s beautiful.”
It’s “Snowfall,” rushing toward its conclusion