For Sofia Vergara, Griselda represents the possibility of reinvention. The new Netflix crime mini-series, her pet project for a decade, casts the former Modern Family star as Griselda Blanco, who survived an impoverished, abusive childhood in Colombia to rise to the top of the cocaine industry in late 1970s Miami.
Delayed by repeated renewals of her hit sitcom, Griselda showcases a new side of the Barranquilla-born actor. But for director Andrés Baiz and producer/writer Eric Newman, Griselda is very much in their comfort zone. Both are veterans of Narcos and Narcos: Mexico, which dramatised the operations of the Medellín, Cali and Guadalajara cartels during the US’s high-profile, low-yield war on drugs.
Griselda follows the classic trajectory of the narcotics drama: slow coming up, euphoric high and catastrophic comedown. “We’ve always designed our storytelling that way,” Newman confirms over Zoom. “There is an element of playing out a fantasy for viewers. Living that life probably is fun for a while, provided you pay for it — and in our shows, you always do.” He gestures towards a framed still of Narcos’ Wagner Moura as Pablo Escobar hanging on the wall behind him. “Every once in a while, someone asks if we’re glorifying these people. This is not Tony Montana [in Scarface] with his shirt open, firing a grenade launcher. Escobar died miserably, alone.”
Both men have other projects on the go — Newman’s is producing Netflix space saga Rebel Moon and Robert De Niro’s upcoming mini-series Zero Day, while Baiz helmed episodes of The Sandman — but are mostly identified with the world of drugs. It is an association Newman — who also exec-produced Netflix’s opioid drama Painkiller — not only acknowledges but embraces.
“It’s an interesting intersection of money and morality, politics and greed: the idea that you can diminish demand by attacking supply, that you can treat it as a law-enforcement issue when it’s really a healthcare crisis . . . As Pablo Escobar said, if the coca leaf grew in Virginia, cocaine would be legal in America. We saw that with the Sacklers and OxyContin. It’s one of the most complicated and misunderstood subjects in the world.”
There is a lot to be said for sticking to what you know in television, where familiarity and brand recognition are more crucial than ever in an ever-fragmenting landscape. Dick Wolf has, in effect, been making the same two shows for decades with his Law & Order and Chicago franchises; ditto David E Kelley (Boston Legal, Ally McBeal, Big Little Lies) with his love of glossy legal procedurals. The Wire creator David Simon has largely stuck to forensic analyses of US cities. Taylor Sheridan continues to expand his repertoire of Frontier stories from Yellowstone onwards. The UK offers the most recent successful instance, with Russell T Davies returning to Doctor Who in triumph after time out on rewarding passion projects, most notably It’s a Sin.
There are, of course, exceptions: commercially, few come close to Shonda Rhimes, who has mastered almost every popular genre: medical (Grey’s Anatomy), legal (How to Get Away with Murder), political (Scandal) and period drama (Bridgerton). Meanwhile, Noah Hawley has reaped critical acclaim for reinventing the superhero genre with Legion and finding the multitudes contained within the world of Fargo.
While Griselda isn’t quite an auteur-led project, Baiz, by directing all six episodes, was able to make it distinct from Narcos both conceptually and visually. “The first thing I asked myself was: what is the Narcos identity? Well, it has archival footage, a voiceover and a very iconic credit sequence. I didn’t want any of these for Griselda, which is very centred on her, rather than being a political show. One of my biggest references was Gena Rowlands in [John Cassavetes’ 1980 thriller] Gloria, more than The Godfather or Scarface.”
Still, the series opens with a quote from Pablo Escobar: “The only man I was ever afraid of was a woman named Griselda Blanco.” Blanco’s gender alone makes her a unique figure in the business, her success self-made. By contrast, Mexican cartel boss Sandra Ávila Beltrán was a third-generation drug trafficker who inspired the TV series Queen of the South.
Blanco is also, for someone believed to have ordered scores of murders during the so-called Cocaine Cowboy Wars, an unsettlingly sympathetic protagonist, having risen to the top in spite of being frequently dismissed by potential rivals as arm candy or a sex worker, and certainly as someone lacking the physical dominance or psychological strength to thrive. These were assumptions she would invariably turn to her advantage, just as Miami detective June Hawkins, also a series consultant, did in facing down the broadly comparable misogyny of her colleagues — she would eventually bring Blanco to justice.
“Escobar loved his kids, but he wasn’t ‘mom’,” says Newman. “What if you are the mother, the last thing between your children and the abyss? Automatically, it’s easier to root for them and maybe ignore what that mission really is, because her kids rely on her and she’s protecting them from the same trauma that shaped her as a child.”
Newman also wanted to counter the masculine framing of drug stories. “There are a number of books and documentaries [on Blanco], but they tend to be executed in the same voice to explain the level of power she had, defaulting to that adage that a badass man is a boss, but a badass woman is a bitch. You’re penalised for being a woman right out the gate.”
Baiz, like Vergara and Blanco, was born in Colombia, which for decades has been irrevocably associated with the illegal drugs trade. Does he worry about perpetuating damaging national stereotypes?
“When this show goes out, you’ll find a lot of people on Twitter complaining about that,” he concedes. “But I’m not concerned, because the emphasis is on human nature. We presented what happened in Colombia with Narcos and people understood the struggles and pain of the citizens of the country, and also how US foreign policy shapes Latin America.”
“[The US has] done tremendous damage there historically,” Newman adds. “A choice was made to ignore or exacerbate the proliferation of drugs in favour of defeating communism. Our shows divide the world not into good guys and bad guys, but bad guys and very bad guys — and those aren’t necessarily traffickers, but dirty cops and politicians and lawyers who betray public trust. After all, no one was complaining when hundreds of millions of dollars were getting pumped into the Miami economy. To me, it’s an endlessly relevant subject.”
And he isn’t ready to quit the narcotics game yet. “Listen, it’s what I’m into,” he says with a laugh. “How many war movies did Sam Fuller make? If Scorsese stops making organised crime stuff, we’ll stop with the drugs.”
Griselda is on Netflix from January 25
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