Karl Puschmann: Netflix’s cocaine-drama Griselda is a fast–paced rush

Sofia Vergara plays a drug kingpin - or perhaps queenpin - in this powerful limited series.

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Griselda, Netflix’s new crime drama, leaves your head spinning like you’ve just hoovered up a fat line of the illegal white powder at the heart of the show’s evil.

Ostensibly, the limited series is an adaptation of the life and times of Griselda Blanco, aka the Colombian “Cocaine Godmother” aka “the Black Widow”, a moniker she earned after ruthlessly dispatching all three of her husbands in murderous fashion.

The show follows Blanco’s journey from new American immigrant and solo mum hustling to sell the 1kg block of uncut cocaine smuggled into Miami in the suitcase of her youngest child to feared drug baroness running an $80 million-a-month cocaine kingdom.

The show portrays Blanco as a plucky, determined boss babe who knows what she wants and knows how to get it. We see she also has a heart of gold and genuinely cares for the people around her. She’s glam when she needs to be, a little hotheaded and utterly fearless in the face of mortal danger. She’s a strong, independent woman trying to make it in a man’s world. And worlds don’t get any manlier than the drug trade.

All of which is to say that Blanco is painted in an extremely sympathetic light. She’s presented as an underdog to root for. Someone who’s constantly belittled, underestimated and ignored by those in power, until she no longer can be.

This happens largely through her instinctive business nous when it comes to the importing and sale of class-A narcotics. Most notably Blanco was the first dealer to recognise that rich white people would be a good market to pitch her party drug to. For those who chose to ignore her business savvy, she gained their attention through an untempered and terrifying viciousness that would ultimately spark Miami’s drug wars of the 1980s.

Not for nothing does the show open with the notorious drug kingpin Pablo Escobar’s quote: “The only man I was ever afraid of was a woman named Griselda Blanco.”

In Griselda, the Emmy award-winning Colombian actress Sofia Vergara blasts away her comedy typecasting. The actress, who achieved super-stardom on the popular sitcom Modern Family, is clearly having a ball in the lead role of Blanco which allows her to showcase her acting chops and hide her beauty behind a prosthetic nose. Here she delivers the kind of exaggerated, swagger-filled performance as Al Pacino’s Tony Montana or Ray Liotta’s Harry Hill. Vergara’s Blanco is cool and the show makes you feel cool while watching it.

Vergara executive-produced Griselda alongside the creatives behind Netflix’s brilliant Narcos, which told Escobar’s story over three high-adrenaline seasons. And there are similarities between the two shows. But where Narcos would bluntly interrupt its Hollywood-style shoot-outs and explosions with actual news footage from the era to highlight the awful, stomach-churning truth behind the show’s exciting action setpieces, Griselda instead embraces the norms of the mobster genre.

There’s no troubling footage of murder victims - civilian or otherwise - to detract from the glossy sheen of the show. There’s also no desire to stick to the facts of her life. Yes, they have to move fast to cram it all into just six episodes but there are a lot of liberties being taken to keep its stylish facade from cracking.

But does that matter?

Griselda is the kind of anti-hero power fantasy that men have enjoyed since the invention of cinema. To name just a few there’s The Godfather, Scarface, Goodfellas, The Sopranos and the aforementioned Narcos, so you certainly can’t begrudge the show for glamorising and romanticising Blanco’s life. It’s unashamedly entertainment, not documentary. And in that, it more than succeeds.

Griselda is a fast–paced rush. Its good time may be wholly manufactured, pharmaceutically engineered to engage and ping your enjoyment neurons rather than educate or inform, but it’s hard to worry about that in the moment. The line between its truth and fiction is better left for ruminating over behind drawn curtains on the comedown.