'Griselda' is crack cocaine for TV bingers
Netflix's 'Griselda' series plays fast and loose with the truth - even in its physical portrayal of the eponymous anti-hero. Illustration: Conor McGuire
Netflix's latest venture into the well-trodden field of narco-dramas, , enters like a Colombian caricature wearing last season's Versace and wielding a plastic machete. It's a six-part drama that tells the story of Griselda Blanco, the infamous 'Cocaine Godmother' who terrorised Miami in the late 1970s and early 1980s. In oblique homage, it provides a melodrama with fantasies of grandeur rather than a gritty exposé of criminal depravity.
At the heart of this enthralling narco-novela is Sofía Vergara, trading in her sass for a latex mask and a permanent scowl. She by all accounts is far more beautiful than the Griselda of reality, who was more akin to a grisly Columbian gnome (see illustration).
Vergara, to compensate, attacks the role with the ferocity of a starving jaguar presented with a prime cut of scenery. She growls, glowers, and snorts through Miami's underworld with all the subtlety of an aging rhinoceros stomping out her territory. It's a simultaneously mesmerising and mystifying as if we are watching a Botticelli Venus try her hand at Latin arm wrestling. This mother rhino is transformed into a paranoid, crack-addled monster presiding over a crumbling kingdom by the finale.
It's a Shakespearean tragedy with mojitos, a drug-fuelled in a white suit and gold chains. Vergara's towering performance ensures that Griselda rivets the viewer in the first frame. Long after the credits roll, her portrayal lingers like a haunting bolero, a reminder of the thin line between ambition and obsession, between the American Dream and the American Nightmare.
The show's creators, veterans of the franchise, have clearly taken their cues from the Pablo Escobar playbook. But where painstakingly anchored its excesses in a semblance of historical veracity, plays fast and loose with the facts, massaging truth into a more palatable underdog narrative. It's as if they've taken Blanco's already brutish but surreal life and decided it needed the dramatic embellishment of a drag queen in sequins and eyelashes.
We're introduced to Griselda as she flees Colombia with her three sons – who might as well be named Moe, Larry, and Curly for all the individuality they're given – and a kilo of cocaine stuffed somewhere improbable. From this inauspicious beginning, we're asked to believe that our plucky heroine, armed with nothing but moxie, murderous intent, and a metric ton of misplaced maternal instinct, will conquer Miami's drug trade faster than you can say "line of credit".
The show revels in its period setting, artfully recreating the Miami of the late '70s as a pastel-hued playground of excess, where the music is always thumping, the shirts are always unbuttoned to the navel, and everyone's nostrils seem perpetually dusted with white powder. It's less a faithful recreation of an era and more what a millennial imagines the '70s looked like after bingeing on and a bowlful of nachos.
As Griselda ruthlessly ascends the pecking order of Miami's underworld, she leaves a trail of dismembered bodies and bad wigs in her wake. Here the show fails, unable to decide whether it wants us to root for her or recoil in horror. Is she a feisty feminist icon, smashing the glass ceiling of male-dominated organised crime with nothing but her wits and a well-placed bullet? Or is she a cautionary tale, a monster of her own fashioning, ultimately consumed by the very power she sought to wield? In its dubious wisdom, the show decides to simultaneously eat its cocaine cake and snort it too.
The very able supporting cast orbits around Vergara's gravitational pull like so many coked-up satellites. There's the obligatory conflicted cop, played with a light touch by Juliana Aidén Martinez. Her character, June Hawkins, is supposedly based on a real detective but comes across more like Nancy Drew after a particularly rough spring break in Cancun. Also worth noting is Martín Rodríguez as Rivi, Griselda's enforcer, who swags through his scenes with barely contained menace while oozing Latin charm.
As the body count inevitably rises and the plot twists pile up with equal abandon, the narrative descends into a fever dream of random violence and our protagonists' crack-fuelled paranoia. By the penultimate episode, our anti-heroine has transformed from a desperate mother on the run to a crack-smoking Scarface in stilettos. It's a character arc that would make even the most forgiving of dramatists raise an eyebrow, but barrels on, confident that if it moves fast enough, we won't notice the gaping holes in logic and character motivation.
The show's attempts at social commentary are a weak subtext to Griselda's voracious liberation from male domination. There is a constant narrative suggesting that Griselda is shattering barriers for women in the drug trade, presented as if it were a significant feminist victory. It's the sort of superficial empowerment that would have the feminist intellectuals gasping in disbelief. Women can sigh in collective relief knowing this industry offers equal opportunities where they too can ascend to the heights of a violent trade that targets the vulnerable and devastates communities. Embrace the experience and relish the moment.
Perhaps the most obvious mistake of is its unwillingness to confront the human cost of its protagonist's acts, even though the real Griselda Blanco was a character of horrifying violence, responsible for innumerable murders and unspeakable misery. The show gives scant respect to this reality, and it's always kept at arm's length and sanitised for our viewing enjoyment. The makers are concerned that we may lose interest in the show if we see Griselda for who she truly is. God forbid we become uncomfortable while binge-watching a TV about a mass-murdering drug lord.
In its last act, seeks to swing towards tragedy as our anti-heroine's empire crumbles and her paranoia reaches a fever pitch. But it is too little, too late. We've spent five episodes watching Griselda work her way to the top, and now we're supposed to feel something - pity? Schadenfreude? Indigestion? - as everything comes crashing down. It's a tonal whiplash that makes you feel as disoriented as someone coming down from a three-day binge.
should be a cautionary tale about the dangers of drug trafficking or unchecked ambition but instead warns filmmakers of the perils of prioritising cinematic style over substance in an already riveting narrative. It's a glossy show that mistakes lavish sets for depth while confusing shock value with what could be a meaningful commentary. The producers embraced the notion that if they threw in enough sex, violence, and 1970s needle drops at the screen, we wouldn't notice the hollowness at its core.
Is this entertaining? Undoubtedly. Vergara's performance alone is worth the cost of a subscription. But when the credits roll on the final episode, you have the nagging impression that you've just binged the televisual equivalent of a sugar rush: exhilarating at first but ultimately unsatisfying and faintly sickening.
wants to be a searing indictment of the American Dream gone wrong, a feminist reframing of the narco narrative, and a rollicking period piece all at once. It ends up being a wildly entertaining but ultimately glossy, surface-level romp through a terrifying and tragic history, more concerned with shock and awe than with a genuinely considered insight or an emotional resonance.
It's the kind of show that will likely find a devoted audience, inspiring countless conversations about its 'daring' portrayal of a female drug lord. But for those who expect more from our dramas than just a well-executed costume party with a body count, leaves much to be desired.
Watching the awe-inspiring Sofía Vergara strut and snarl her way through six hours of increasingly violent yet glamorised scenarios, I couldn't help but lament for the real people – the mothers, daughters, and sisters – whose lives were shredded by the avaricious and bloodsoaked drug trade that this show so blithely elevates to entertainment. Their poverty-ridden stories, too banal for the small screen, are still waiting to be told with the gravity and nuance they deserve.
may not reinvent the wheel of narco-dramas, but it enthralls by giving it a fresh coat of neon paint and a nitrous boost. The series will have you binging, so do it in style with a mojito and the Miami Sound Machine on the stereo. Just remember, as the terrifying Griselda herself might say, to indulge responsibly. After all, you wouldn't want to end up like one of her unfortunate associates.
