Are you after a fast, buzzy TV premise? Just dig out the razor blades and powered sugar – and come up with a story about dealing cocaine. From Scarface to Top Boy to Narcos, the illegal drug trade has been an endless source of fascination across film and TV. It is a story that has been told and retold: the frenzied rises and antic collapses of empires built on powder.
The latest project to fit this mould is Griselda, a six-part Netflix drama focusing on the real-life crimes of Griselda Blanco (Sofía Vergara), a Colombian woman who moved to Miami in the 1980s and built a drug trafficking empire. Griselda has shot to No 1 in the streaming service’s charts, and has prompted no small amount of praise for Vergara. (Known for her comic roles, in particular Modern Family’s more-than-just-a-trophy-wife Gloria Delgado-Pritchett, Vergara is acting here against type and under prosthetics.) On the surface, the series is exactly the kind of lurid, attention-grabbing drug narrative that has enraptured viewers for decades. It’s got all the snorting and shooting of Tony Montana, with a more contemporary girlboss undertone. So why, then, is Griselda so tiresome?
Vergara’s series has exposed an unfortunate truth about these stories: the selling of drugs simply isn’t that interesting to watch. Even if you take into account the thrills that accompany it – fights, power grabs, gangland assassinations, all of which Griselda features – there’s something all a bit rote about the archetype. The best and most interesting drug-trade narratives have always sought to do something different with the genre. The Wire handled drug dealing with a prosaic realism, a lens through which to scrutinise the city of Baltimore’s systemic socio-political failings. Breaking Bad was, in some ways, a conventional rise-and-fall morality tale but the specifics of its making – from its chemistry-teacher-turned-crook premise to the eccentric twists, to its one-of-a-kind visual language – elevated it far beyond this. Griselda, meanwhile, walks the path of cliché, hitting familiar crime beats without ingenuity or particular flair.
