Somewhat Disappointing
Just finish season 1 of Narcos and have to say I was disappointed. On the one hand, it has nice cinematography but on the other hand, there are a lot of elements that don?t work and just tend to drag the entire rest of the show down around them.
The problem is that the show?s about the rise of Escobar for about two episodes and then a bloody stalemate for eight episodes, and the nominal protagonists are the least interesting characters on the screen at any given time.
When this show works, it?s about the vicious gray-area struggle of Colombians who want to take back their country fighting against both a corrupt government, and against drug dealers who in the height of irony are seen as Robin Hood style heroes by the downtrodden. There is magic to this. There are gorgeous and tragic stories here of politician after politician dying, of men who go into the darkness they are swearing to fight, of the terror of living with a price on your head by people who are trying to buy your silence, of the weeping exhaustion of a nation that negotiates with terrorists because they can?t bury anymore children.
And then we get a couple of incidental American cowboys shoehorned into the protagonist position so unbelievably that the actors can?t even act like they really matter to the story.
(nobody in their rights mind would kill a DEA agent). Really! Why would any cartel give a *beep* about killing a DEA agent! I mean they're out to get them anyway so it really doesn't change anything if they kill a few DEA agents in the process!
The story is also ill-served by the choice to utilize a pseudo-documentary angle at times. It?s very basic storytelling, but damned if they?re not going to give you an American dude?s voiceover of news footage instead of actually showing us the story.
There are often scenes, especially early on, in which we have two minutes of voiceover news footage followed immediately by a thirty second scene that appears to exist for no reason other than for the characters to react to the info that we just had spoon-fed to us. Except that the characters shouldn?t be reacting to it in that way, because they have been living it day in and day out. They don?t just find out about two months of plot advancement in a voiceover like we do and then take time to yell at each other about it on a random afternoon.
And the voiceovers themselves are atrocious. They each rattle on in a dry monotone that has exactly the same pattern of speech. Duh-duh-duh; duh-duh. Pause. Duh-duh; duh-duh-DAH. Over and over. Voiceovers shouldn?t be in monotonous iambic pentameter. And every single one of them ends with some painfully dramatic and overly serious statement like ?but the war was only beginning? or ?but this time, there would be no peace?.
Numerous plot threads are picked up with no real reason and then dropped just as quickly. A way that stories like this can get into trouble is by somehow feeling that they don?t have to connect the dots since they?re telling a true story. Like when the protagonists decide to take home and shelter a communist who?s being hunted by the CIA because she might have info. And then hide her. And then risk jail time protecting her from their own country. And then smuggling her out of the country.
In the context of the show here is absolutely no reason for us to see any of this. And then once she?s gone none of it mattered anyway. This is a repeated phenomenon. When you're telling a story, you carve out what makes it a story instead of just random miscellaneous events.
Over the course of about half an episode, Escobar goes from hero of the people and a possible presidential candidate to vilified murderer. Apparently showing a mug shot of someone in the Colombian parliament automatically impeaches them six minutes into their term? That?s just bad storytelling. And that's constant in this show. It never really finds any kind of rhythm in odd ways. I mean why would they spoil the conclusion of the eight episode in the very first episode?
This show just makes too many very fundamental errors in storytelling that leave it lacking any kind of real spark.