Thoughts on Setting and Snoop

In the Netflix Original Coach Snoop, famous rapper Snoop Dogg coaches a youth football league for kids in underprivileged areas. He says in the beginning of the sports docuseries how he wants to be a mentor, and almost a father figure to struggling kids with single parents or kids that isolate themselves and end up with the wrong crowd. A little further into the first episode, Snoop says the reason he takes the league to out of state games is to show the players how much bigger the world is than their four blocks.
The episode opens with a black and white flashback scene from Snoop’s past run in with a drive by shooting. We can see dilapidated floor boards on the porch, worn fences, and front and center- a gun. So it’s a bad part of town. But we can see that these are all just kids being shot at and having to decide to shoot back. This is not the environment they should be in, or anyone for that matter, and that is the basis for Snoop’s Youth Football League (SYFL). 
 From there on,  it can be immediately seen how important the different settings are going to be. There are close-up scenes of dirty shoes laying in the road and slow motion shots over graffiti, all with Snoop’s voice overlayed talking about the life he wants to keep kids away from. So it can be inferred these signs are more than just a sign of uncleanliness, rather symbols for a life lived among drugs, dealing, and gangs. But when they travel out of state, like to Seattle in the first episode, we see those same close-ups and slow motions over city lights and clean, modern skyscrapers. These scenes are suppose to symbolize how important it is for at-risk kids to make it out of their poor environments and towards a more successful life.
While we can see stark differences when the team is playing in the bad parts of LA versus the uptown part of Seattle, the one place where setting is ambiguous is on the field. For every scene that is focused solely on the player’s point of view from the field, not including the stands, it is impossible to tell what state they are in. And for someone analyzing the show as a whole, that fact gets Snoop’s message across more than anything. It doesn’t matter where the kids are at, as long as they aren’t on the streets running drugs at the time being and have a hope to make it out of there one day. 
Without the strong emphasis on setting in this docuseries, the message wouldn’t have the same effect. Just simply stating that you don’t want the kids in your community on the streets isn’t enough. You have to see the streets and see the behavior that the area enables, and then see what the better alternative is. Children should not ever be placed a situation that would require a gun at any moment, and once you see that with your own eyes you can further appreciate the effort to turn that around.