In this six-episode mini-series, the “Narcos” team focuses on the journey of Colombian Griselda Blanco, at the origin of one of the most powerful cartels in history.
She was nicknamed The Queen of Coca, The Black Widow or even The Godmother, had the role of mentor for Pablo Escobar, and for drug trafficking that of popess. Griselda Blanco, Colombian drug trafficker murdered in 2012 in Medellín, is the subject of a 100% Netflix series, retracing her irresistible rise and inevitable fall in the cocaine-fueled and hyper-violent Miami of the late 1970s and early 1980s .
Piloted by Eric Newman and Doug Miro, two captains of Narcos – of which it is, if not a derived series, at least a sort of extension – Griselda finds its own path in the identity of its heroine: a woman, both loving mother and inflexible warlord, evolving in a world of men, often macho to the last degree, and invariably ruthless. La Madrina will therefore have to redouble her vice and cruelty to impose herself at the head of a powerful cartel, and extricate her clan from a war of traffickers dosed with hemoglobin, which sees corpses piling up against a backdrop of Floridian sunsets and of gleaming Italo disco.
Inspired by real events
Solidly crafted, Griselda should not disorient fans of the genre, familiar with the feats of arms of Pablo Escobar (Narcos) and bloody settling of scores by Mexican cartels (Narcos : Mexico). This is also the major criticism that can be leveled at this autopilot series, which reuses all the ingredients of its predecessors without questioning the merits of such a repetition, nor even questioning the saturation of violence, copiously fetishized, which she stages.
Best known for her role as Gloria in Modern Family, Sofia Vergara comes away with honors in the title role despite the prostheses, frankly dispensable, which freeze her face, and contribute to this feeling of artificiality which insidiously contaminates the series. This is because the Netflix recipe, labeled “inspired by real events”, ends up exhausting the reality from which it is inspired, or, worse, bends it to its will, through formatting. Rise in fall extremely marked, Griselda does not escape the sentence.
Griselda by Eric Newman and Doug Miro with Sofia Vergara on Netflix
