YMMV / Snowfall

• Angst Aversion: The grim tone of the show (particularly in the later seasons) and the fact that any genuinely heroic character tends to end up dead has deterred a lot of potential viewers.
• Audience-Alienating Era: The fifth season was the first season to be produced entirely without John Singleton's guidance, and consequently, it was the point where the show started to move away from the somewhat grounded drama of previous seasons to less plausible storylines, like Cissy becoming an asset for the Cuban government and the utterly baffling "The Iliad" two-parter which inexplicably includes Franklin and Oso being stuck in a cage with a tiger. The season also introduced two of the show's most hated characters, Franklin's obviously-criminal wife Veronique and Teddy's cartoonishly-evil paramour Parissa.
• Awesome Music:
  • The first-season finale ends with Solomon Burke's "None of Us are Free" as it shows everyone getting entangled into the crack trade.
  • In the third-season finale, Nina Simone's rendition of "Strange Fruit" provides a haunting soundtrack to the brutal gang war that has broken out in the wake of Franklin being sidelined.
  • "Lying in the Hammock" ends with Ann Peebles' "I Can't Stand the Rain", which starts off as a bluesy number before sounding triumphant, perfectly fitting Jerome's realization that he's too old and battered to keep working in the drug business, but that if he quits now, he still has time to do something meaningful with his life.
  • "Ballad of the Bear" ends with "Sympathy for the Devil", which fits perfectly for Franklin and Oso finally getting one over on Teddy after years of him manipulating them.
• Moral Event Horizon:
  • Franklin killing Andre Wright. The fact that he can't even admit that he did it to his family and friends is telling.
  • Teddy killing Irene Abe in order to silence her exposé. Considering all his alleged loyalty to America and its people, he has no problem killing an innocent woman to suppress freedom of the press.
• Romantic Plot Tumor: Starting in season 5, there is the romance between Teddy and Parissa, a former Iranian asset that he turns to for some off-the-books medical care and who he inexplicably keeps going back to despite knowing that she's mentally unstable. Despite almost nobody liking the pairing, the final two seasons continually cut away from the actual plot for domestic scenes between the two of them.