Damson Idris has been trying to prepare viewers for a tragic end to Snowfall for years. Over six seasons, we’ve seen his protagonist Franklin Saint go from a determined Compton neighborhood kid eager to take his family out of poverty to a cold-blooded multi-millionaire drug-dealer. The FX drama, which was one of the late director John Singleton’s last projects (he died in 2019), is a retelling of the crack cocaine epidemic in 1980s Los Angeles and the CIA’s—fictional—involvement in it. We see Franklin graduate from selling weed to becoming the biggest crack dealer in the country as he partners with Teddy, a government operative flooding the streets with drugs to bankroll the CIA’s black ops.
That relationship soured going into the show’s sixth and final season, when Franklin’s attempt to quit prompts Teddy to rob him of his fortune. The depths that Franklin sinks in search of his money chart his final descent into true antiherodom. In the end, Saint doesn’t die or go to jail—but he is left completely alone, with the family members he dragged into his criminal organization dead (his uncle Jerome, played by Amin Joseph), incarcerated (his mother, Cissy, played by Michael Hyatt), or in the wind, like his best friend Leon (Isaiah John), who moves to Ghana. He becomes a homeless alcoholic, much like the absentee father he spent most of his life hating, stumbling like a ghost around the same Compton neighborhoods he used to run.
Idris’s magnetic performance as Franklin, who transforms from an eager kid to dead-eyed capitalist, powered the show from when it found its footing in season three and even through shakier seasons like five. In a just world, he’d have at least three Emmy nominations by now. But Idris tells GQ he’s just happy that above all else, he and the show’s creative team delivered an ending that he’s certain Singleton would be proud of. (In the final scene, set in 1990, drunk Franklin walks by a bespectacled Compton kid filming a movie in the hood and yells, in an ad-lib Idris came up with, “Y’all ain’t gon win no Oscar!” GQ spoke to him about Franklin’s point of no return, the alternate endings to Snowfall that were considered, and coming up with some of the final season’s best lines off the cuff.
Ending a series is one of the hardest things about making serialized television. How did you guys land on leaving Franklin where you did?
Well, we always really knew that it would end in tragedy. This is a guy who’s done some horrible things, and karmic retribution is real. You have to be accountable for your actions. We definitely fought, from very early on actually, to try and make Franklin as dislikeable as possible, so that if audiences were still on his side, we knew we had them. There would be an ongoing joke, all throughout the show, that, “Man, no matter what we make Damson do, they always love him.”
I remember at the end of Training Day, they wanted Alonzo to die in the worst way because he was a foul guy, right? We spoke about Franklin dying, or Franklin going to prison, but it was a predictable ending. But to live like exactly what he despised, his father, was a testament and was truthful to so many Black men of that time, who walk around Skid Row today, muttering to themselves and everyone else that they used to be the shit, and they used to have all the money in the world, and no one believes them. And that’s the feeling we wanted to create with Franklin’s scene. And it was a whirlwind, man. We shot the ending sequence over two days, I think.
Frazier Tharpe
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