Narcos

Colombian drug lord Pablo Escobar’s story has been told and retold in books, films, documentaries, and TV shows. But Netflix’s original 10-episode drama series Narcos, now streaming on Netflix, is a welcome addition, even if it starts out a little slow.

At the heart of Narcos is a dramatic study of a man so stinking rich, he tried to buy himself a presidency. By the 1980s, Escobar (Wagner Moura) was raking in $5 billion per year through his bloody drug empire. He had so much dough that laundering was impossible, so he buried stacks of cash beneath fields, behind walls and ceilings, even in his mama’s couch. He buys the police, he buys the politicians, he buys his people’s love. Even so, Escobar is never satisfied.

Meanwhile, DEA agents Steve Murphy (Boyd Holbrook) and Javier Peña (Pedro Pascal) plot to bring Escobar to justice. Murphy’s constant voice-over narration provides tight, subjective background context on the Reagan Doctrine, Colombian law (and corruption), and the social and political toll of the drug war. When mentioning Escobar, Murphy’s tone vacillates between admiration and disgust.

The scenes of Escobar’s intimate moments also portray the antihero/villain in juxtapositions: he’s tender with his wife, but fools around with another woman; he plays soccer with his kids while ordering an assassination on another child’s father; he professes love for his countrymen even as he recruits their young to bomb a plane (vulgarity, nudity, and gore alert!).

Shot in Colombia with a majority Latino cast, the dialogue in Narcos is mostly in Spanish with English subtitles. That brings a sense of realistic focus on the real players—the Colombians—rather than on the American “good guys.” Gritty and grisly, Narcos is magical realism at its peak—a well-researched, sharply written history lesson of a devastating, dazzling drug war that’s too relevant for comfort.