A quote from Pablo Escobar appears on screen: “The only man I was ever afraid of was a woman named Griselda Blanco.” How, then, could you not tell her story? The team behind Narcos – writer Doug Miro, producer Eric Newman and director Andrés Baiz – which told Escobar’s own story, has seized the opportunity and run with it in the new six-part Netflix miniseries Griselda. It stars Sofía Vergara (who also executive produces) as the woman who would become a terrifying drug lord known as the Cocaine Godmother. It is the kind of bold, meaty, dramatic part that she has surely been hankering for after long ago proving her comic chops in Modern Family.
Miro plays a little fast and loose with the real-life Griselda’s narrative. The first episode opens in 1978 while she is injured and gathering up her three sons to flee her drug-dealing husband in Medellín, Colombia and move to Miami, Florida. A friend, Carmen (Paulina Dávila), who made a similar desperate journey a few years before, takes them in and gives Griselda a job at her travel agency. This is on condition that Griselda leaves cartel life behind and starts anew. Unfortunately, Griselda fled with a kilo of uncut cocaine in her bag so that she could provide for her family – and the lure of proper money, instead of a receptionist’s salary, proves too great.
In reality, Griselda came to Miami as part of her evasion of federal charges after setting up and running for 10 very successful years a drug operation in New York City. But an underdog narrative is an easier sell, and so the truth has been massaged for greater palatability.
Soon, however, you won’t care how much is fact and how much is invention. Where Narcos was a grim, gritty account of Escobar’s rise and fall, with a quasi-documentary feel, Griselda is stylised pulp semi-fiction played fast and loose, whose direction falls just the right side of flashy. It is, especially in light of the terrible suffering and destruction she and her operatives leave in their wake during the three years covered in the six intense hours, the most appalling fun.
In the early episodes, it looks as if it might be gathering to become something more than fun too. The misogyny and sexism that Griselda meets as she tries to sell her brick of cocaine in the new town is nicely sketched as a force that work against – and occasionally (thanks to players’ low expectations of a woman) – for her. There is a nice but never overplayed sense of sisterhood among the women she brings over from Medellín (their bras stuffed with more coke, which is sliced out and added to the pile of possibility on a motel room scale), whom she knows from her days working alongside them in a brothel. Vergara not only gives a barnstorming performance, but one that shows how early brutalising experiences hone a survival instinct and also bring whatever latent propensities for violence someone – even a woman! – might be born with into something truly murderous and ruthless.
It also shows the pervasive sexism of the time in the supposedly more civilised arena of the workplace. A Latina police officer, June (Juliana Aidén Martinez), is the first to pick up on the possibility that there is a new player in town rather than a new girlfriend who keeps being in the wrong, soon blood-spattered place at the wrong time. Her attempts to be heard are drowned in the sea of hilarious pranks with which her fellow officers amuse themselves (turning up the air-con so her nipples can be seen through her shirt, filling her office with crumpled copies of the memo she sends round about the new woman and so side-splittingly on).
Later episodes squander setting up potential rich seams that could have differentiated the series more sharply from Narcos – and the many other drug cartel films and dramas there have been. The series becomes too infatuated with set pieces and depictions of the extraordinary horrors that Griselda, like any cartel boss, unleashes in her pursuit of power and the expansion of her fabulously lucrative empire. Overall, the story of her rapid rise and fall hits all the beats and delivers all the tropes we have seen before. It doesn’t fulfil the promise it had to present us with something different, something deeper.
But it remains hugely enjoyable, well paced and gorgeous to look at throughout. There isn’t a weak performance in it and it functions always as a much-deserved showcase for all that Vergara can do. It is a reminder that casting directors and viewers, too, have their biases, their set expectations of women and of comedy actors (and especially of beautiful ones), and that it can be a joyful thing to watch them be overturned – even if a lot of bras have to be ruined and a lot of people have to die very bloodily in the process.
Griselda is on Netflix
