I started this series with doubts about whether it would be a gripping drama or a rather mundane, conventional Netflix true-crime bio-drama. By the second episode, I knew it was definitely in the former category and it maintained this drive and drama to the end.
From early on in the series, an implicit and not too heavy-handed parallel was drawn between Blanco and her nemesis in the police department, June. Both were women trying to make their way in a man’s world, surrounded by those who doubted and patronized them but who persisted and did what was necessary in their eyes , be it legal or not.
Vergara gave necessarily very dominating performance – she ruled the screen as effectively as Blanco did Miami and was a large, if not the sole, reason for the drama’s success. However, in terms of relationship to the apparent character and nature of the person she was playing, there was definitely a degree of sentimentalisation in the portrayal. The trope of ‘the good mother doing what she had to do for her children’ was heavily used, particularly towards the end. The real Blanco was, by all accounts, a psychotic monster and while this was indicated in the opening quotation from Pablo Escobar ‘the only man I was ever afraid of was a woman – Griselda Blanco’, whether this was true or not, the drama dd not wholly and honestly show this, grim though much of it was.
Towards the end there were parallels with Scarface in then portrayal of someone who made the almost fatal mistake of using their own product, although nothing as spectacularly sensational as that famous scene with Scarface with his face in a mountain of coke! But for Griselda, and others in a similar position, she was addicted not just to the product but the unbeatable highs that her whole life and drama of what running her business involved and she just could not quit that rush, in spite of her protestations to her children near the end about starting a new life.
Vergara, as I have said, was sensationally good and managed to be as spectacularly dominating when on screen without chewing the scenery. And I liked the visual motif, running throughout the series, of her occasional outlining with the end of her cigarette, of those achievements of which she was most proud – her first mansion, her children playing on the beach etc. The soundtrack was great too – both the songs and orchestral music. But then it was set in 70’s Miami so one would expect that.