‘Griselda’ Series Premiere Recap: Miami Heat

Before you so much as hit play on Griselda Episode 1, there’s already a big question the show needs to answer. That question has nothing to do with the life and times of Griselda Blanco, the real-life druglord and mother of four who was one of the deadliest of 1980s Miami’s so-called “cocaine cowboys,” or with the lead performance of Sofía Vergara, the actor whose interest in Blanco made the show happen.

The question is this: Why in God’s name would Netflix, a streaming service that already has a smash-hit anthology series about real-life druglords called Narcos, hire the team that makes Narcos to make this show about a real-life druglord, and not call it Narcos too? 

The answer becomes apparent when you watch the show. The result of this collaboration between Vergara and the Narcos team, I’m happy to say, isn’t Narcos: Miami. This is not some extra season of the original show, made in the same gritty true-crime faux-docudrama style, with the same gruff Scorsese-esque narration explaining the nuts and bolts of the drug trade — but with a new title slapped on top, out of either marketing concerns or a desire to screw unions out of an extra season’s raises. (Why do you think The Sopranos, Mad Men, Breaking Bad, and The Walking Dead all wrapped up with seasons that had a Part 1 and a Part 2 instead of just having two separate seasons?)

No, this is a new, distinct thing — more elegant in feel, more intimate in scope, at least so far. Narcos never let you forget that you were watching history in the making, even when it was telling you about the very earliest days of its cocaine kingpins. While we know from an opening quote that Griselda wound up scaring even Pablo Escobar himself, that’s not reflected in the episode itself. Instead, this premiere (“Lady Comes to Town”) feels like the story of one very determined, very resourceful, and ultimately very dangerous mother, whose flight from certain death after murdering her mid-tier narco husband has not stopped her from wanting to make a lot of money. It’s a personal story in other words, not a geopolitical story, as every season of Narcos wound up being.

Telling Blanco’s story has been a longtime passion project for Vergara, who was able to get it off the ground when her colossally popular sitcom Modern Family wrapped. It’s been shepherded to the screen by the Narcos team of director Andrés Baiz, co-creators Eric Newman and Carlos Bernard, and writer/co-creator Doug Miro, plus additional writer/co-creator Ingrid Escajeda. (Escajeda wrote the astounding third episode of Apple TV+’s tense dystopian thriller Silo aka the one with the giant engine-room sequence, so I’m all in favor of her coming aboard.)

Now here’s where I hand it to Sofía Vergara herself. If Griselda is telling this druglord’s story not with the sweep of a Narcos (or a GoodFellas or Casino or The Wolf of Wall Street) but as a personal antihero’s journey, that places a whole lot of weight on the person who plays that antihero. So far, I’m really liking what I’m seeing, especially given Vergara’s inexperience in playing dramatic roles. Unless you’ve decided to be uncharitable I don’t think that inexperience is reflected in the work on screen.

Let me put it this way. I buy Vergara’s Griselda as a wounded woman on the run, patching up a bullet wound with a maxi pad and band-aids before hustling her confused gaggle of boys to Miami literally overnight. I buy her as a woman who can hustle that whole family into a single room in at her old buddy Carmen’s (Vanessa Ferlito) apartment, sincerely conveying her desperation after fleeing her abusive husband Armando (Armando Ammann, so memorable as the dapper gay Colombian druglord Pacho Herrera throughout the Narcos series).

I buy her as an essentially well-meaning person who’s grateful for the day job Carmen hooks her up with but also bored to tears by it. I buy her as a woman resourcesful enough successfully seduce and browbeat low-level dealer Johnny (Wilmer Calderon) into introducing her to his boss Amlicar (José Zúñiga) in hopes of selling him the kilo of uncut coke she managed to smuggle out of Colombia. I buy her as a woman out of her depth who gets rejected by Amlicar and mugged by Johnny.

I continue to buy her as a woman capable of tracking Johnny down, beating the shit out of him with a baseball bat, stealing her coke back, and demanding a sit-down with someone who can take it off her hands. I buy her in her meeting with Eddie the Bird (Alberto Mateo), an eccentric who agrees to buy the coke on the condition that she reach out and touch his prominent nose. (This winds up being surprisingly hot, to be honest!) 

I buy her as a woman who can survive the subsequent massacre, where Alcimar’s men burst in and slaughter everyone but her. I buy her as having the steel required to show up at Alcimar’s club still covered in blood and demand he try the coke he killed all those people for, just to see how worth it it would be to go into business with her. (The stuff is so pure that it can be cut three times before sale, turning a ridiculous profit for the traffickers.)

Finally, I buy her as a woman who’d bite the bullet and sleep with her idiot husband’s more powerful brother to wipe away the husband’s debts, then leave him for asking, then kill him for trying to stop her. It’s in that moment that we learn exactly what kind of person we’re dealing with. (For real, Griselda had already been a player in both Colombia and New York by the time she fled to Miami with her kids in tow.) That’s an impressive range to pull off while still maintaining the same basic vibe of a very pretty but very broke divorcée, for lack of a better point of comparison, but she does it.

And again, this does not feel like Narcos, despite the presence of nearly the entire creative team and at least one memorable star. The score, for one thing, is sweeping and orchestral, courtesy of Carlos Rafael Rivera — Old Hollywood rather than New Hollywood, if you will. Director Baiz captures the seedy glamor of this world with subtle, languorous zooms an and eye for sparkling light; there’s a shot of Griselda at the nightclub in particular that really took my breath away. The pulsating disco of the soundtrack is a delight as well.

I didn’t know what to expect going into Griselda, beyond a general raised-hackles sense that someone was pulling a fast one by not just making a new season of Narcos already. What I got was a surprising performance in a glamorous and gory hour of TV with a banging soundtrack. You cut that kind of thing into a line on my glass table and you bet I’ll be inhaling it.

Sean T. Collins (@theseantcollins) writes about TV for Rolling Stone, Vulture, The New York Times, and anyplace that will have him, really. He and his family live on Long Island.