‘Snowfall’ Spinoff ‘The Drop’ Is an Evocative, If Uneven, Portrait of South L.A. in the Gangsta Rap Era: TV Review

The FX drama “Snowfall” was one of the sneak success stories of the Peak TV era. Co-created by a marquee film director in “Boyz N the Hood” auteur John Singleton, “Snowfall” thrived where many series of similar origin failed. But it did so quietly: “Snowfall” didn’t win awards or mint breakouts beyond lead actor Damson Idris, but after premiering in 2017 — before the launch of Apple TV or Disney+, and an eternity ago in Hollywood years — the crime show steadily grew for six seasons before concluding in 2023, a rarity for an original drama these days.

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Three years later, “Snowfall” has received another accolade that testifies to its under-heralded success: a spinoff. Beginning in 1990, four years after the final episodes of its parent show, “The Drop: A Snowfall Saga” retains the South Los Angeles setting, but shifts its focus from the drug trade amid the rise of crack cocaine to the music industry amid the rise of gangsta rap. Instead of a West Coast version of “The Wire” or “Narcos,” “The Drop” is more like a fictionalized version of N.W.A biopic “Straight Outta Compton.” (There’s a nod to the late group member Eazy-E in the opening minutes.)

While “The Drop” doesn’t craft its protagonists into figures as compelling as Dr. Dre, Ice Cube or Snoop Dogg, the world they navigate is instilled with a vivid sense of place. It’s rare for productions to film in L.A. these days, let alone celebrate the city to the extent “The Drop” does. That’s a quality worth admiring, even if the series can be uneven in its early episodes.

The connective tissue between “Snowfall” and “The Drop” is heroine Wanda (Gail Bean), a recovering addict set on improving her lot in life, and her ex-boyfriend Leon (Isaiah John), a reformed dealer initially tangential to the plot until Wanda ropes him into her master plan. (“The Drop” creator Malcolm Spellman, previously of the Disney+ Marvel series “The Falcon and the Winter Soldier,” never worked on “Snowfall.”) Wanda’s vision is to creatively matchmake her 19-year-old cousin Lamarr (Asante Blackk), a budding producer, with buzzy rapper Artillery (Simmie Sims III, himself an MC who performs under the stage name Buddy), whose latest underground single controversially crows over a police officer killed in the line of duty.

Watching Wanda scramble her way up the industry ladder, managing her charges and sweet-talking gatekeepers, gives “The Drop” its skeleton. “Atlanta,” another FX show about the rap game and its pitfalls as experienced by two cousins, almost took its main characters’ upward trajectory for granted, letting their ascendance play out in the background while episodes focused on smaller scenarios. “The Drop” takes a more linear approach as Wanda lobbies money man Darryl (Brandon Mychal Smith) for a job as an A&R executive and label boss Jenny (Isidora Goreshter) to put Artillery’s song on the radio. When Wanda applies the principles of drug distribution —  let customers sample the product for free, and they’ll pay for more if it’s good — to putting out a tape, it’s a clever callback to “Snowfall.”

Inexplicably, though, “The Drop” neglects key players in the music business story for family strife that can’t match the intrigue of the rap game. Artillery, who’s being hunted down by vindictive cops, rightly accuses Lamar of caring more about sourcing vocals than his physical safety. But “The Drop” is guilty of the same tunnel vision; besides Artillery’s gang affiliation with the Bloods, whose escalating conflict with the Crips makes everyday life increasingly violent even for civilian bystanders, we learn almost nothing about him as a person in the first five episodes. Instead, “The Drop” is focused on how the death of Lamar’s mother, once a musician herself, affected him and his older brother, James (Peyton Alex Smith). The siblings were raised by their grandparents, laundromat owner Big Daddy (Mykelti Williamson) and his wife, Gerty (Nicki Micheaux), the latter of whom is firmly against Lamar and her niece Wanda chasing the dream she still blames for the family’s loss.

“The Drop” spends an entire episode teasing out the backstory behind this shared wound. While a well-liked actor from another prestige cable show makes an appearance as Lamar and James’ late mother in a pleasant surprise I won’t spoil, nothing revealed about the household’s family dynamics is as intriguing as the period detail in the flashbacks. An opening scene of a tent revival in 1950s L.A. gives way to the Afros and wide lapels of the 1970s, skipping through generations of Black migration, religion and musical tradition. There’s no reason “The Drop” couldn’t use other storylines as a vehicle for such anthropology, especially with underdeveloped figures like Artillery or Jenny — an L.A. native waging an uphill battle to modernize her dad’s company — standing on the sidelines.

That the scenery can be so much more intriguing than the action in the foreground is a recurring problem with “The Drop,” but also a testament to its strengths. Like any story about fictitious talents, “The Drop” can strain to position its original music as a world-altering invention; Wanda posits that a single heavily sampling Chaka Khan’s “Ain’t Nobody” is the kind of uniting force that could end gang warfare, an eyebrow-raising idea. But I had no trouble believing the palm-lined streets, Craftsman houses and sunbaked concrete were the same ingredients that gave rise to a massively influential art form. If “The Drop” can get its plot to the level of its immersive production, it’ll be something to see.

“The Drop” premieres on FX and Hulu on Sep. 8 at 9pm ET, with remaining episodes airing weekly on Tuesdays.