Narcos

This came out in, what, 2015, maybe 2016 I think (no I can't be bothered to look it up what do you think this is, a reputable blog or something?), anyway breaking news, really securing my rep as a writer and critic on the cutting edge of the scene. It’s a kind of docu-drama I guess, a fictionalized re-enactment of key moments in the life of Colombian 70s-80s cocaine kingpin Pablo Escobar.

First off, let me confess I only watched this because I kind of liked Boyd Holbrook’s performance in “Logan” and I’m kind of burnt out on any and all things Disney (Am I going to watch the next Marvel D+ series coming out next month? Oh you bet I am). Or serialized shows generally that aim to just go on forever, like the Simpsons, shows that exist only to go on existing.

It’s nice to have a show that has a definitive endpoint in mind. 

Second off, great mustache work all round. Really, hats off to the mustache wrangler. Amazing stuff. Everybody rocking the 80s porn ‘stache, the pencil, the handlebar, the horseshoe, the Miami Vice stubble, you name it. First-class follicles.

Third off, watching this is almost exactly like watching the old “Unsolved Mysteries” TV show from the 80s, which might be a deliberate nod given the time period, look it up on YouTube if you don’t know what I’m talking about, anyway where Robert Stack would narrate a re-enactment of some crime or mystery or other. Narcos has almost the same format, stretched into 10-episode seasons: Boyd Holbrook does a bit of serious narrating, cut to 5-minute re-enactment of the life of Pablo Escobar, cut to archive news footage from the period, rinse and repeat.

Especially in the first half of season one, this gives the show a kind of jerky stop-and-start pace, with the years just racing by, pausing only for three lines of dialog between Pablo (hands on hips, joint in mouth) and his cousin Gustavo (hands on hips, cigarette in mouth, hunter cap on head).

Boyd is a DEA agent, Pedro Pascal his partner, and the two are ostensibly main characters but they don’t do much other than angrily swear to take down Escobar about twice per episode. That’s on the powdery side of thin for characterization, and gets old pretty quick, particularly when you realize these boys have been sniffing too much of their own product and ain’t got a hope in hell of actually catching the man—it’s all just so much hot air.

The show is set almost exclusively in Colombia, so on the one hand it provides a look at America’s War on Drugs from the outside, as it were, from the viewpoints of both the drug dealers and the government that had to deal with them. I think this format lets the USA off a little lightly, okay a little very extremely lightly, as the market whose combination of ravenous, insatiable appetite for cocaine and flailing, desperate attempts to squash the consumption of cocaine helped create people like Escobar.

It's also good though to move away from the US as the center of all creation and see how all the flailing affected people in the country it all started in, caught in the crossfire, kind of double victims here, of drug lords empowered by American money and pawns in a war waged with American money, victims of the consequences of both America's hypocritical love and hate of drugs. The insights into the internal workings of Colombia's politics and attempts to deal with Escobar wound up being the most interesting part of the show.