Nice to see other fans of the show. I liked season one, haven’t watched the second one yet. I took a break to go watch Pablo Escobar, El Patron del Mal, which is also available on Netflix and was a 70+ episode series on Escobar produced in Columbia.
It’s all in Spanish but the subtitles are good enough. It’s long and very drawn out, and one of its goals was to spend more time showing the lives of Escobar’s victims (I believe the producers of the show are the family of the journalists at the paper that was printing stories about him that he didn’t like). As a result it at times comes across as a soap opera, called novella in Hispanic culture, due to the sappy parts, the low budget, and the cheesy soundtrack, but it’s also fairly accurate and feels almost like a month by month account of Escobar’s rise and fall.
Anyway I mention it on case anyone might be interested in another show about Escobar.
[quote=“Bernie_Dy, post:41, topic:77133”]
I took a break to go watch Pablo Escobar, El Patron del Mal, which is also available on Netflix and was a 70+ episode series on Escobar produced in Columbia.[/quote]
I started to watch this last year. Never finished it, but I did appreciate that it got more into detail due to the large number of episodes - after all, season 1 of Narcos covers 15 years of his life in just 10 episodes. Often enough the slower pace enough, but there are also parts that felt like a drag due to that.
Yeah, the show can’t quite deny some telenovela sensibilities, and regular elements are unintentionally hilarious., e.g. dramatic zoom-to-face-close-up plus correponding music cue.
I like the first season so far (currently I am on ep 9)… but the only thing I really dislike is the voice over. It is too grandpa like. Too much handholding, sometimes I am not allowed to make my own conclusions due to VO…
right, I read that the actor is from Brazil and that he learned spanish for the show? For my foreign ears it sounds very good, he has a very distinct way, rhythm… so he has an accent?
Huge, and very disconcerting since he’s te only one. Other actors don’t have specifically Colombian accent, but that’s harder to catch for me and thus more tolerable.
But the main guy broke suspension of disbelief a couple of times for me.
I loved the series but I do agree alot
Of it was factually incorrect.
I always wondered what happened to the kids, turns out his son is dating some model from the UK called Libby London & his daughter is a nurse.
Apparently they havent been allowed to leave south america for years, but his son has an upcoming book tour with his model gf in europe in may I think.
His book
Is great worth a read.
Finished up the second season over the weekend. My wife and I really enjoyed it. I thought the pacing of both seasons was excellent. In Season One, they needed to cover a lot of ground getting you up to speed on who this guy was, how he started out, and what made him tick. Season Two was more about the hunt. It was more tense by design, more suspenseful and compact, it was almost as if you were watching one really long drawn out episode to end the series. It worked for me.
It looks like Pena will at least be a part of Season’s 3 & 4 as one of their only experts on the Cali cartel. The Cali story should be pretty interesting, as I remember stories about the American government (CIA mostly) involvement with Cali and a subsequent falling out, including some Cali cartel leaders deaths that were rumored to be US Special Forces hits. Cali was famous for it’s money laundering, they actually owned and operated banks and legit businesses that laundered billions worldwide. At their height they had organizations like the NSA and the KGB worried, so that should make for some good stories to tell.
Had to delete my other post as I’d misinterpreted mok’s link headline. After reading the link it’s the opposite of what I thought. Usually the descendants of a criminal complain that said criminal is not accurately portrayed because he’s made more menacing or because the descendants are still in denial about the criminal doings. This article is interesting because it’s the opposite. That’s a new one, for me at least.
While I agree with Escobar’s son in theory, I’m not sure how practical it is to blame Netflix for “kids wanting to be like Pablo Escobar”. For one thing, Escobar is portrayed in the majority of the shows episodes as being out of control, paranoid, hunted, haunted and in the end as a sad, lonely and desperate man who dies alone and a pariah in the very city that once worshipped him. I can see wanting to be like Pablo Escobar if you only watched the first few episodes…after that, uh no.
Secondly, anyone who lets their kids watch Narcos should probably be punched in the privates, repeatedly. Perhaps by “kids” he’s talking about 16-20 year olds or some such? In which case see the above paragraph. To blame Netflix is silly, if anything Narcos stands as a sober warning to would be drug lords about how likely that lifestyle is to lead to a sudden and violent end long before you ever get to spend all that money.
Yeah, it’s particularly interesting given how family centric the show depicted Escobar as being, and how affectionate and caring he was to his son in particular.
I do think any show that features the perspective of criminals is going to skew towards making them more sympathetic, in part because they humanize individuals and provide context to their monstrous acts. But also in part because their flashy successes are overweighted given the natural time restrictions, and because many heinous and less sympathetic but prolific offenses such as rape are muted for view sensibilities, which distorts the picture drawn of organized criminals.
No more than shows that feature the mafia or inner city gangs though - shows like the Wire or the Sopranos though – arguably less so, since Narcos devotes considerable time to the police/prosecution perspective and those characters are depicted of the heroes of the show. The Wire had a police perspective, but the characters weren’t exactly very likable except for maybe Bunk, at least in comparison to criminals like Omar and Stringer Bell.
Yes, all good points. It’s not just the kids that Escobar’s son refers to that have messed up sensibilities either. I remember reading that some people worshipped John Gotti like a celebrity.
So I’d agree with Slainte, this isn’t a Netflix show issue, it seems more to me like a people and education issue.
Binge watched both seasons a few months ago and loved it all except for Escobars’ accent, which being a Spanish speaker and familiar with Colombian accents, annoyed me. But his charismatic performance somewhat made up for it.
But I feel like maybe the portrayal was a little too dark, brooding, like he always has something heavy weighing on his mind which i didn’t get from the footage and pictures of the real-life Escobar.
Great cast, though another accent that bugged me was Luis Guzman’s who was in a few episodes. It clearly wasn’t Colombian, he didn’t even try. He sounds more like a Puerto Rican from the Bronx (which I think he is! And come to think of it, maybe his character was too, but it seemed out of place).
At least he was a native speaker. Escobar’s accent really required an effort to suspend your disbelief. Loved the series, but, man, was that a casting mistake.
Even the blonde CIA guy had an accent that at times sounded better (exaggerating, but not by much).
Blew through season 3 over the weekend, and liked it a lot. It doesn’t have the towering presence of Wagner Moura. I really enjoyed watching him, but if you’re one of the native Spanish speakers who didn’t like his accent, that might be a plus. I’m certainly not missing the Murphy voice-over though which always sounded like a parody of itself. There’s still voice-over nown (Pena), but it doesn’t feel as massive or grating as in the first two seasons.
Good cast again and I enjoyed watching many actors who you’d otherwise only know through some Spanish or Mexican productions. (Or Swedish ones in the case of Matias Varela.) The guy who played Chepe was a delight and certainly the one out of the Cali gentlemen that channeled Escobar the most.
I’m two episodes in. I agree with most of what you said. It doesn’t quite have the presence of Pablo Escobar and the main DEA guy, Steve Murphy, but I like that where so many of the other Escobar shows end with Escobar, naturally, this one is continuing on. Although a focus on Escobar feeds the human fascination with larger than life bad guys the drug trade hardly ended with him. It will be interesting to see if it keeps going and eventually gets into the other cartels like the Zetas and follows into other figures like el Chapo.
