FX announced it has ordered production on a pilot for Snowfall, director John Singleton’s hour-long drama about the crack-cocaine epidemic and its effects on Los Angeles in the early ’80s. Singleton will shoot the pilot, which he co-wrote with screenwriter Eric Amadio, with production beginning in the summer.
Snowfall will incorporate some of the same material as last year’s Jeremy Renner film Kill The Messenger, in which Renner played the real-life journalist who discovered evidence of a CIA plot to import crack into the U.S. Hopefully it will have more success than that film, which debuted to mixed reviews and failed to recoup its paltry $5 million budget. It certainly helps that Snowfall features a Mexican wrestler among its trio of central characters. The wrestler, Gustavo Zapata, will transform himself into a gangster—all while hopefully continuing to wear the same flamboyant costumes—and will collide with Franklin Saint, “a young street entrepreneur on a quest for power,” and Logan Miller, “a prominent family’s ‘black sheep’ desperate to escape his father’s shadow.”
The drama was originally set to bow on Showtime, but FX arguably needs it more, with the rapid-fire conclusions of Sons Of Anarchy and Justified leaving holes in its drama slate. If ordered to series, Snowfall will join The Americans as the network’s second 1980s period drama. Given its characters and setting, Fleetwood Mac’s “Tusk” probably won’t make it into this one.