After getting clean, Gail Bean’s Snowfall character Wanda Bell has her sights set on the music business.
In the trailer for Snowfall spinoff, The Drop, set to premiere on Tuesday Sept. 8 on FX and Hulu, Wanda is shown proclaiming that West Coast rap “is the new gold rush; no cops, no murder”
She then goes to her cousin Lamar (Asante Blackk) and asks him to make a beat for her as the two of them try to attract volatile local rapper Artillery (Simmie “Buddy” Sims III).
And, via voiceover, as the tapes start piling up, she explains how what she witnessed with Leon and Franklin (Snowfall star Damson Idris) building their crack empire, gave her a “front-row seat to how they changed the game. We know our customers because they are our customers.”
As the trailer goes on, the tensions on the streets ratchet up as family members disapprove of Lamar getting involved with the rap game and Wanda’s threatened more than once.
And Leon suggests Wanda may be in over her head.
“I know these streets just like you,” she tells him.
“But you don’t know this gangsta business like me,” he replies.
Still she ends the preview on a high: “I’m unstoppable, baby!”
Here’s the synopsis for the new series, set in ’90s Los Angeles, which Snowfall jumped ahead to in its 2023 series finale, with Leon telling Franklin that Wanda was trying to make it in music.
“The Drop: A Snowfall Saga follows Snowfall characters Wanda Bell (Gail Bean) and Leon Simmons (Isaiah John) as they fight to reinvent themselves in ’90s Los Angeles, where the fallout from the crack epidemic is fueling a new game: the rise of West Coast rap. Wanda starts the series driven by the clear belief that West Coast rap has the power to reshape American culture. She will work to put together a ragtag group of geniuses and lead them to the realization of all their dreams. To do it, she must navigate the dangerous overlap of music and street politics, pulling in those closest to her including her cousins Lamar Kinsey (Asante Blackk) and James Kinsey (Peyton Alex Smith), and pursuing volatile local rapper Artillery (Simmie “Buddy” Sims III), who is already in a tangle with law enforcement. Her internship with former D-boy-turned-label-owner Darryl ‘DG’ Grant (Brandon Mychal Smith) creates opportunities but also deepens tensions between Wanda and Leon, who has vowed to leave the streets for good and chase down his own atonement through his free legal clinic. As ambition, loyalty and survival collide, how much is everyone willing to risk in order to build something lasting in a world that threatens to pull them down?”
The cast also includes Mykelti Williamson, Nicki Micheaux, Isidora Goreshter, Eric Balfour, Richard Portnow, Zaire Adams, Demetrius Grosse and Quincy Chad, with Chad reprising his Snowfall role as Big Leon.
Malcolm Spellman (The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, Bel-Air) executive produces the series from FX Productions with Snowfall EPs Dave Andron, Thomas Schlamme, Julie DeJoie, Michael London, Trevor Engelson and Paul Garnes.
Speaking to The Hollywood Reporter for the Snowfall finale, Andron explained crafting the narrative so Leon and Wanda, then happily married, could move forward.
“One of our guiding lights for who was going to make it out was: The people who had taken stock of the things they’d done and tried to change their lives should get to make it out,” he said, naming Leon as one of those characters. “It felt like you wanted there to be, for those people, a chance to go live a life. They get a chance to go forward and try to right the wrongs of their past. That felt important as well. Because the reality is it’s not just hopeless for everybody. But that was the guiding light for who gets a happier ending.”
