Snowfall is, "in its vicious way, one of the most powerfully nostalgic shows on television"

The New York Times

The FX cocaine saga, which returns this week for Season 5 is a Wonder Years for the drug trade, says Mike Hale. "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," says Hale. "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." Hale adds that Snowfall borrows some "tragic-young-men archetypes" from Singleton's Boyz N The Hood, "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... 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."