Narcos

Success has many fathers, but in general there is only one figure behind every brilliant idea. Thanks to Alexander Graham Bell we can let us drive a pizza when the passion to cook leaves us for a moment, Thomas Edison showed us the light and thanks to the extensive work of Pablo Escobar we now have nice sing-alongs like: Tears Dry On Their Own, Saturday Night and of course I Wanna Dance With Somebody. At least, his invention seems to be the perfect fuel for spitting out hits and catchy evergreens like this. Viewed in this way, Pablo Escobar was indirectly actually a bigger hit machine than Sjon Joebenk. That achievement deserves its own biography and Netflix, in turn, is not afraid to meet that need. While the last hardened hippies in the back of their rusted Volkswagen T1 took another heavy hit of their joint and here and there a confused student during art class secretly tried to take the glue all over his lungs, Pablo Escobar worked in the late 1970s. in Colombia to a substance that really gets you out of your plug. Very artistic and backward America would soon draw its nose in a straight line over a mirror to numb the senses. A reclining mirror, that is, otherwise it would all look rather strange. Not to mention the mess it would give. The cocaine of Escobar and his Medellín Cartel engulfed the American states and during the 80's many people took more powder than fresh air into their lungs. When the umpteenth junkie runs off with the car radio of an innocent citizen again, America is a bit done with it. They're sending DEA agent Steve Murphy to South America to sort things out with the local authorities. Easier said than done, because apart from thick rolls of money and some forgotten mints, Escobar also has almost the entire judicial system in his pocket. All difficult. For Murphy & co. then, because Pablo himself is of course very satisfied with the course of events. I once wrote about Breaking Bad that it was just as addictive as the crack Pinkman and White were cooking in their dilapidated mobile home, so I can't use that sentence again. Too bad, because it would nicely cover the Narcos load. Episode one was great, two, three, and four dragged on a bit, but from five on, there was no stopping it. Season one slipped in faster than a lamb shoarma dish after a night out. Nice to look at a series in which you have not seen the cast in a hundred other productions. Apart from that Puerto Rican dude who's in everything, but whose name you never know (Luis Guzman), it's a face book full of new faces, at least for me. Wagner Moura, like Pablo Escobar, is convincing and is occasionally assisted by old archive footage of the master himself. This increases the feeling that you are looking at truthful history, while of course everything is regularly doused with the necessary salsa sensational (that is Spanish for sensation sauce). Colombia as a decor is something different from the rainy streets of New York or the candy color setting of LA and this produces a deluge of beautiful images. And I don't know about you guys, but I love beautiful images. Beautiful images taste like more, so it's a good thing that Netflix has already announced that we can wet our chest for Narcos round 2 next year. Cómo impresionante es eso ?!

The second season is also quite worthwhile although I remain with my opinion that an Andres Parra, the squinting, fake Pablo from the Colombian series "Pablo Escobar: El Patron del Mal" could have taken this series to an even higher level, because I find Wagner Moura a lot less convincing in the same role. And yes, as far as the correct representation of the whole story is concerned; Netflix itself indicates at the beginning of each episode that part of it is fiction to dramatize the story, so we really can't complain about that. And now we have to wait and see with whom and how Netflix will continue this series because it was, because of the great success, almost certain that they would not stop after the death of Pablo Escobar. In Mexico they will certainly be able to get some inspiration, but you can also continue the story in Colombia with the Cali cartel or go back in time until well before the period of Escobar. Plenty of choices.