Sometimes it feels a little bit like the world’s best “dramatic re-enactment” but you’ll quickly get caught up in the action and forget about that. For instance, instead of using a fake mug shot of Moura as Escobar, Narcos uses the real mug shot. One great trick to ground the action in reality is using real news footage and other artifacts. So this is all based on a true story? Yes, though some of the names and places have been changed. Some of the most beautiful shots in the movie, like Escobar taking in the immense Colombian plains in the twilight, are ruined with silly chatter. The voiceover has a tendency to go a step too far, informing us of emotional states that should be depicted rather than explained. That is a sentiment that would be much more powerful were it displayed rather than just told to us. “This war would shake an entire country to its foundations,” it tells us. However, the voiceover often goes too far. There is no way that the show could have been made without it, because otherwise all the action would have been leaden with exposition. DEA agent Steve Murphy (Holbrook) narrates each episode in voiceover putting everything into context and introducing the characters to lets us know why they’re significant. It’s shocking at how quickly and efficiently this drama handles such an immense cast, especially as characters come and go for episodes at a time. Is it hard to keep track of everyone? No. Not only does the plot involved all the members of Escobar’s Medellín Cartel and the staff of the US embassy in Bogotá, but members of a splinter communist group, two US presidents, several assassinated Colombian politicians, a prostitute turned informant, and all sorts of other characters both big and small, noble and compromised. How epic does it get? The story is quite sweeping going from Chile in the late 70s, when the country shut down the drug trade there and moving to Colombia, Nicaragua, the Bahamas, and, of course, the United States throughout the 80s and 90s. Also there were always shades of grey on both sides in The Wire, here it is very clear who are the bad guys and who are the good guys.

Yes, it looks at both the cops and the criminals and tells both sides of the story, but it’s more concerned with the epic, international sweep of the drug trade than the microscopic impact on one community.

So it’s kind of like The Wire? Eh, not really. What is this show? This is the story of notorious Colombian drug kingpin Pablo Escobar (Wagner Moura), his rise to prominence and reign of terror over the country and the two American DEA agents (Boyd Holbrook and Pedro Pascal, who played Oberyn Martell in Game of Thrones) who are trying to take him down.

Pablo escobar the drug lord ep 3