Snowfall and Breaking Bad have a ton in common. Both are highly acclaimed and beloved series, although the former series didn’t have as much success with the award bodies as Breaking Bad. It definitely should have had more success, especially for Damson Idris, but that’s a story for another day.
Breaking Bad is the best show ever produced. It will probably always top my personal list of television shows, topping any and everything from Daredevil to Fallout and Succession. Snowfall doesn’t top all of them, but it comes close, and it scratches the itch that Breaking Bad left me with all those years ago, even though Better Call Saul did help because it’s in the same universe.
Snowfall and Breaking Bad Are So Similar, I Love It
If you couldn’t tell, I just finished watching FX’s hit drama, Snowfall. It took me a while to finally make it through the 60 episodes, but I finally arrived at the end that so many others were there for a few years ago, and the journey was more than worth it.
What I love about Breaking Bad is the demise of a protagonist who slowly becomes unrecognizable, morphing to fit his own greed and hubris that were relatively well-hidden at the beginning of the show. Walter White was always an unhappy man who wanted power and money. Franklin Saint was always greedy and wanted to escape poverty at any cost.
By the end of both shows, Walt and Franklin are virtually unrecognizable to their younger selves, but the seeds were always there. Walt has plenty of opportunities to get out of the game, and his reason for getting into it, the cancer, goes away eventually. Franklin has plenty of opportunities to get out, and he even claims he’s going to get out. Obviously, in neither case did that actually happen.
Nothing will ever beat Breaking Bad, but I actually think Snowfall does something a little better in this cautionary tale of what the pursuit of money and power can do to those who seem nice and innocent initially. The real, tangible consequences are unavoidable for the Saints and their friends, whereas Walter skirts by for a little while, avoiding the worst of it until the end.
Slowly but surely, Franklin loses everything around him, including his humanity. I was in awe of the ever-increasing stakes that destroyed everything around the main characters, including some of them, until it got too close. It is truly impressive to see how insane things got when reflecting back on the earlier seasons.
Of course, the similarities don’t end there. Both shows focus on the drug trade in various locations, with Snowfall taking a look at the real-life cocaine epidemic in Los Angeles in the 1980s and Breaking Bad taking a fictionalized approach to the methamphetamine trade in Mexico and New Mexico in the present day.
The plot structure is similar, too. Follow along as the protagonist, which is a clever framing trick, eventually becomes the antagonist and reaches a satisfyingly horrible end. Drug and crime dramas like this aren’t uncommon, but ones that do it so well like this absolutely are.
Conclusion
If you’re like me and have been longing for Breaking Bad since you stopped watching it, Better Call Saul and Snowfall are the best bets to find anything to give you that same feeling again. It’s narratively brilliant, with writers and showrunners subtly taking the audience on a journey it is not fully aware of until it’s over. Franklin Saint is a different shade of Walter White, and they’re two of the best main characters in television history.
