‘Snowfall’ Spinoff Boss Malcolm Spellman Lays Out Multi-Season Plan for ‘The Drop,’ Why Season One Was Just a “Dash of What’s Coming”

[The following story contains spoilers from the first season of Snowfall spinoff The Drop, including the season finale “Hercules.”]

By the first-season finale of FX‘s Snowfall spinoff The Drop, the record label execs that Wanda (Gail Bean) and Lamar (Asante Blackk) were eager to do business with earlier in the season have turned sinister. After Artillery (Simmie “Buddy” Sims III) and Dara’s (Aleyse Shannon) close friend Keith (Hanad Abdi) is murdered, the label execs try to use his death to drum up free publicity. Then they rush out Artillery and Lamar’s album, swapping in other artists and making it a compilation. Ultimately Wanda, Lamar and Artillery seem to end the season in control of their own destiny. But, according to The Drop showrunner Malcolm Spellman, this is “just the beginning” of the series’ central family’s dalliance with a music industry that doesn’t have its artists’ best interests at heart.

“What the audience is seeing in that finale, in the last three episodes, will be completely normal all throughout season two,” Spellman tells The Hollywood Reporter.

Though The Drop has yet to be renewed and Spellman says he has yet to hear from FX about renewal prospects, he says he’s “not worried” and remains confident based on community feedback that the show is a hit.

And he already has a larger vision for the show, including seasons two and three.

“Eventually, the reality of what happens in this story is that money and gangs ruin it from the inside and from the outside. Record executives took a culture and decided it was easier for them to make money pushing violence and gangs and all that shit than conscious hip-hop, and these labels literally destroyed an entire dimension of hip-hop and took it into the gutter over the next 30 years. And I want to show that, and I want to show in a way that is realistic and show the audience how cynical that decision making is, and how inescapable it is,” Spellman says. “I think for season two and moving forward, what I want to get into gradually over let’s call it season two and three because it’s moving very gradually, is the labels, manipulation and destruction of our culture and our burden. How we allow gang culture and money and materialism to rot us from the inside as far as conflict.”

Speaking to THR, Spellman talks about how even though Wanda and Lamar end the season on their own, the labels will continue to have “all the leverage,” what the future holds for central couple Wanda and Leon (Isaiah John) and why the series is ultimately about family.

Conceptually where did you want to get the narrative to by the end of the first season?

Narratively, I wanted to thoroughly introduce each of the characters and bring them all to various forms of a crisis point that either exposes their best and worst inclinations. And by the end of season one, they’re just getting into the music business, and the audience should now be indoctrinated to these characters enough that once season two begins, we will have seen everyone either succumb to their inner monster or overcome it. But we know those traits are there. So I wanted to, in a nutshell, end it narratively with they finally broke through, right? But what is really the issue is what these people are on the inside when tested against this kind of journey into the music business. And just really indoctrinating the audience to the era. There is so much people really don’t understand. Like, people are gonna get mad at the masters storyline, the heist, because they don’t understand that’s how primitive the world was back then. If you take the tapes, there is no recourse. These kids who are in the show were like, “This doesn’t make sense.” And I’m like, “You don’t understand.” This is a time where you could have an emergency, and it takes you three days to find the person you love to tell them. Just because they weren’t at home when you called.

Why did you want to have Wanda and Lamar be betrayed by the label and tease out how the label execs weren’t really protecting and interested in helping them so early on?

Because I think this is just the beginning of that. If I had 20 episodes, we’d have even gone deeper, but that’ll be season two. If you think about it like this, up ’til episode five, it’s all indoctrination, and then six, seven and eight are very different feeling. They’re a bit more plotty because we’re dealing with a record business story. In real life, these motherfuckers were taking out life insurance policies on the rappers, because you could legally do that back then, and not telling the family or anything. And then when they died, they’d get a million dollars. What you see in those last three episodes is the label is behaving completely normally, and in the ’90s, artists were far less compliant. Artists really considered themselves artists. One of the things we’re going to explore in season two, and what you’re seeing the setup with the label doing this, is this is just as ’91 is when gangster rap begins to overcome and destroy conscious rap, and that is by design by the labels. It was easier for them to make money with negativity, and they just leaned all the way in, and a whole genre of rap died.

We definitely see that foreshadowing with the label wanting to get publicity around Keith’s death and rush out the album. For Wanda and Lamar, they seemingly end the season on their own. Do you see them as like being independent going forward, or are they still trying to work with the industry?

That [going independent] wasn’t really a thing then. The label has all the leverage, and they are going to be forced into very uncomfortable situations, and there is no place to go. There is no other option. Like, what I was trying to tell someone in the comments section is there is no rap industry yet. Rap is not on mainstream radio yet. That happened with Dr. Dre and The Chronic. Rap is not on mainstream radio. What are you gonna do? You’re not gonna do anything. This is it.

With Lamar, we see him return home and apologize for how he reacted when he found out about his mother. He was beaten up, but what do you think it is that makes him come home and apologize and want to seek forgiveness from Mama G (Nicki Micheaux) and be connected to that family again?

So that’s sort of the soul of the show, right? The story of the mother is going to be the story of Lamar, and he’s clinging to that safe place, but he’s going to get pulled away from it in the next season. In a nutshell, for a soundbite: This is a show about a family, a makeshift family, including Artillery and all of them. The music business destroys families, and this family will spend its entire existence in this show trying to survive. What we just saw was a dash of what’s coming.

What’s Lamar’s headspace at the end of the first season, after he spent so much of it trying to break away from the family?

I just felt like Lamar had a coming of age. Lamar is a genuinely Christian boy who believes in those values and this family. We’ll see it in season two. They’re not just church kids; they believe in those values. Remember when Pastor Rodney (Wren T. Brown) says the line about the prodigal son? We dropped where they had a scene together where they talked about that: the prodigal son has returned from his journey. He is more mature. He will be less selfish, though that will always dwell inside of him. And he now knows after tasting the fires of what the music business is going to be, he needs his family, particularly Wanda and James (Peyton Alex Smith), for him to survive this. So he’s retreating to what he understands and the culture that saved him.

We see Leon getting much more involved in the music industry throughout the season. And at the end, he gets involved in the scheme against DG (Brandon Mychal Smith) and shoots and kills Deon (Quincy Chad). He’s packing up the legal clinic. Does that mean that Leon’s back in the game and more involved professionally with Wanda and her ambitions going forward?

Leon had a very mythical journey in season one, and for Isaiah, it was super important for us to get that character to a place that if we want Leon to function as Leon has in Snowfall, he had to go through a redemption thing and deal with his mourning, because of all the shit he went through in the original series. Once that happens, Big Daddy (Mykelti Williamson) sort of sets him free with that story he tells them. That’s Big Daddy’s way of saying men of our age understand that violence is part of the world, as is murder and death. That story he told is the true story of how my wife’s family came to California. People have to understand, the North Hollywood shootout, that’ll never happen again. But we grew up in an era where men put on full body armor and took on the cops. It was a different fucking time in America. And so, for Big Daddy, the lesson he helped Leon learn is that violence will be necessary. And if you’re protecting my family, even stuff like killing that kid in Snowfall has to be excused because you are in these circumstances. So when he picks up that gun, we know Leon is finally ready to get into the music business and protect his family.

You can tell he feels reluctant to take a more violent route.

Yeah, it’s killing him. Like that scene in episode five, that’s real, man. He’s looking at all the ghosts. And he’s killed a lot of people.

And he was trying to pave a path that was more about helping people and being on the up-and-up.

To be a righteous Black man from this environment in ’91, that was a task. Kids complain about shitty jobs today and say we had it easier. And I explain what unemployment means, which is unemployment meant literally for me to get jobs, I had to put in applications at every fast food restaurant throughout the city, and most times they would just say there is no work. That’s what like seven and eight percent unemployment gets you, and it was higher than that sometimes in the ’90s for Black people. So this is it. This is their journey. They do not have other options. And for Leon to go on this journey, it’s going to be very similar to the one he went on in the original Snowfall.

I’m sure you can’t give too much away, but what would you say about what the future holds for Leon and Wanda as a couple? There’s clearly a deep connection and past there.

In my opinion, they are the heart of the show, and will they or won’t they should be a major question every fucking season. And sometimes they will find a way to make it work with each other, and sometimes it’ll fall apart. And what season one does is, I think, introduces real stakes, meaning that you really feel like Leon is kind of done with her after that. And we need that for the audience to believe when season two begins that they have to fight for their love. Their story is based on me and my wife’s story. Here’s what the show is: Leon and Wanda is will they, won’t they every season, close calls, falling outs, and everything. And by the end of the [series], they have a wedding. I think they will ultimately be an uplifting story because it’s based on me and my wife, who went through all this shit.

As the show has rolled out, you’ve also released the songs from the series. How has that helped having that original music out there?

This to me feels like a private party for Black folk right now, and it’s the most fun until the mainstream audience comes. I’m not even saying that’ll ruin it, but right now, with the way the songs are being received and the way the communities [are responding], it’s just been fucking amazing. I just went to San Quentin. Every single prison in this country is locked in on our show, and those are our fans, people who came from this era and who saw it. Those are the people that if we can convince them, then we did the shit right.

All episodes of the first season of The Drop: A Snowfall Saga are now streaming on Hulu.