Into a cultural moment already roiling with political theater, border issues and gun violence drops “Narcos,” a new series from Netflix that chronicles the rise of Pablo Escobar, whose ruthless monomania was matched only by his enduring antihero popularity.
Two decades after being shot by the Colombian National Police, the man who fueled cocaine use in the U.S. and founded the Medellin cartel, who had officials and agents assassinated and thousands of Colombians slaughtered, remains larger than life, the subject of countless articles, books and films. In Medellin, tourists go on guided Pablo tours.
That addictive combination of brutality, enormous wealth and personal charisma, which fuels so many careers and genres of fiction, is precisely what creators Chris Brancato, Eric Newman and Carlo Bernard and director Jose Padilha attempt to explore with “Narcos,” which begins streaming Friday. It’s a grand if inconsistent experiment that, from the moment it opens with a definition of magic realism, wears its considerable ambitions on its sleeve.
“There’s a reason magic realism was invented in Colombia,” we are told right off the bat by DEA Agent Steve Murphy (Boyd Holbrook), as if to prepare us for evocations of Gabriel Garcia Marquez or Isabel Allende. Instead, we get a gangster tale super-sized by sheer volume (So much coke! So much money! So much violence!), sprinkled with ideology (communism, militarism, liberation theology) and loosely wrapped in the larger context of nostalgia for the ’80s and America’s war on drugs.