No Blow No Show:Narcos S1.

"Colombians say God made our land so beautiful it was unfair to the rest of the world. So, to even the score, God populated the land with a race of evil men" - Presidente Cesar Gaviria

"There's a reason magical realism was born in Colombia" - Steve Murphy

Initially aired back in 2015, many of you will have seen Narcos at least a lustrum back but, as established on a recent blog, I'm new to Netflix so I'm playing catch up. There's a lot on Netflix so it's hard to know where to start but (a) enough people had recommended Narcos to pique an interest which (b) was already there due to a love of history and world politics and (c) a trip to Colombia with my friend Chris back in 2015 in which we visited Bogota, Cartagena, Barranquilla, and even Pablo Escobar's old manor, Medellin.

In 2015 Medellin (and Colombia) was hospitable, fun, and beautiful. Judging by season one of Narcos, from the late seventies to the early nineties, it may have been only one of those things. It would have been inhospitable even for those that live there who'd certainly not be having much fun for the most part but it still would have been beautiful with the caveat that the most beautiful parts of the country would be equally as dangerous as the ugliest parts. Perhaps even more so. Drug kingpins preferring to move out of the poor barrios as soon as possible.

The ten episodes, narrated by Steve Murphy (Boyd Holbrook) - an American drug enforcement agent embedded in Colombia, chronicle the life of Pablo Escobar, his consorts, his rivals, and the politicians that either bend to his will, try to control him, or try to stop him, as well as how Murphy and his friend and colleague Javier Pena (Pedro Pascal) in their attempts to bring Escobar to justice can't help becoming part of the story themselves.

Staying close to true events but taking a few liberties for artistic reasons , it's brilliantly done from start to finish. The action is tense and fast moving but characters, if they live long enough - hardly guaranteed in Escobar's orbit, are given space and time to develop and breathe and the feel of a country struck forever in the 1970s is hard to escape as the screen fills up with 'taches, quality Latino mullets, brown leather jackets, cars with walnut dashboards, people swigging from bottles of whisky and chain smoking in their offices, and, of course, bombs, drugs, and corpses. Some of which suffer the further indignity of being puked on, barbecued, or hung from a tree (along with a dead cat) for a photo op.

The music too is bang on the money. I was regularly having to pause Narcos to Google the names of Colombian salsa and cumbia bands like Fruko Y Sus Tesos, Orquestra Ritmo de Sabanas, and, Los Corralers de Majagual, Mexican rockers Los Dug Dugs, and Houston's psychedelic metal pioneers Josefus. Often the soundtrack is diegetic, played at nightclubs, bars, and in cars, and never is it intrusive or obstructive.

The story is too well told for that. Beginning in the pre-Internet, pre-mobile phone, pre-GPS era it starts with Richard Nixon becoming President of the US reminding us that this is a global story in which Colombia suffered most. Nixon hated Commies, which always helps when running for the highest office in America, and backed a coup d'etat on 11th September 1973 (9/11) which resulted in the democratically elected Salvador Allende dying and the dictator General Augusto Pinochet taking power.

Chile, at the time, was on its way to becoming the world's top cocaine exporter but Pinochet shut down the labs, had all the dealers arrested and then had them all killed. Except, it seems, one. Cockroah (Luis Gnecco) earned his nickname when the bullets missed him and he played dead so as not to give the firing squad a second chance. Soon he was on his way to Colombia where he zeroed in on Pablo Escobar (played brilliantly by the Brazilian actor Wagner Moura) who was already making a decent living smuggling cigarettes, booze, and marijuana in Medellin, Colombia's second city.

Cuca/Cockroach knows that together they can get rich in Colombia but Escobar's magpie eyes are on a far greater prize. Miami and the US cocaine market. Soon cocaine is smuggled around Colombia in trucks hidden under potatoes and on planes to the US swallowed by pregnant women (pregnant women, we learn, can swallow more yayo than non-pregnant women but if the bag splits inside them, which it sometimes does, they're in big trouble - they die).

As cocaine travels one way, money comes the other. Escobar's Medellin lab couldn't produce enough supply to meet demand so a further outpost was opened in the jungle and both the smuggling and the crime continued. In both Colombia and Florida. Between 1979 and 1984 there were over 3,000 murders in Miami alone but the US government wasn't particularly interested in drugs. Money was their concern and the drug enforcement agents on patrol were looking for hippies smoking marijuana more than they were gangsters pushing cocaine.

Even when Ronald and Nancy Reagan start their 'Just Say No' campaign, Escobar continues to expand his empire and increase his ridiculous wealth. The planes he charters into America now take pit stops in the Bahamas and often there's a wild party full of hookers for those in senior positions within his organisation. Escobar himself treats himself to boats, private jets, and a personal art gallery of Picassos and Dalis.

His vanity was such that he even had designs on becoming Colombian president and when he started to have so much money that he started to hand it out to the poor of Colombia (other times he literally buried huge wads of cash in the ground) his popularity was such that it didn't seem impossible or even particularly unlikely.

To many, he was their Robin Hood. Taking from the rich and giving to the poor. But unlike any version of Robin Hood I've ever heard of, he had his rivals tortured and murdered and kept the vast majority of the wealth to himself. Hacienda Nopales, the luxurious estate Escobar had built for himself and whose gardens he filled with zebras and hippos, is, admittedly, architecturally very pleasing and some of the cars look like they've come out of a set of Top Trumps.

Stephanie Sigman (who plays Escobar's mistress Valeria Velez) is none too shabby either but she is more than that. She's an important pivot in the story as a journalist who also sleeps with Pena. Velez has an agenda beyond sex but so do Escobar and Pena. A group with a different agenda to all these three are the M-19 Marxist militia group. Led by Alejandro Ayala (Rafael Cebrian) and Elisa Alvarez (Ana de la Reguera), M-19 were a guerrilla movement who wanted to use terror to open up Colombia to democracy (go figure) and stole the country's liberator Simon Bolivar's sword from a museum as a political gesture in 1974.

When M-19 kidnap Marta Ochoa (Carolina Gaitan), the daughter of one of Jorge (Andre Mattos) and a nominal rival of Escobar's on the Medellin drug trafficking scene, Escobar sees this is as a chance to form the Medellin cartel with Jorge, his brother Fabio (Roberto Urbina), and the unhinged Gonzalo Rodriguez Gacha (Luis Guzman - the Puerto Rican character actor you may have seen in Boogie Nights and other Paul Thomas Anderson films).

Under the rule (of course) of Escobar, the man who made Colombia bleed, and his cousin Gustavo Gaviria (Juan Pablo Raba - who in a show that features some very natty threads gets to sport the best schmutter of all) the Medellin cartel begin to exert so much power that when a court announces an extradition it's the judge that has to wear a mask to protect his identity. The cartel are soon making more money a year than General Motors and Escobar's property empire expands to the extent that at one point he has eight hunded houses. Though nowhere he can truly call home as he lives as if permanently on the run.

When the Nicaraguan Sandinsita movement create an opportunity to link drug trafficking with communism (incorrectly - Manuel 'Pineapple Face' Noriega was an opportunist with no genuine political affinity and interested only in self-advancement like his modern day analogues Trump and Johnson) the US government starts to fund the DEA officers in Colombia and the deadly game steps up yet another level.

Escobar bombs an Avianca jet killing 110 people in November 1989 but fails to get his intended target, presidential candidate Cesar Gaviria (Fabian Mendoza) was not on the plane. According to Narcos, Murphy had warned Gaviria not to board. Hmmm. What's more certain is that his attempted assassination created a tidal wave of support for Gaviria and he won the election for president by a landslide.

Other atrocities carried out by Escobar, his accomplices, and his toadies create terrible tragedies and we start to see the tide turn, in Colombia, against Escobar but, as Murphy points out, the closer you get to Escobar the more dangerous he becomes and I won't spoil the enjoyment of the show for those of you who have either not watched it nor read any news in the last thirty years.

Needless to say the 'warnings of drug misuse' that appear at the start of each episode are superfluous and if you want to see people brutally murdered, rich drug kingpins partying around pools and ordering the death of their enemies you'll not be let down by Narcos. But there's far more to it than that. As with shows like The Wire it's a meditation on how power corrupts, how good and bad are relative concepts, and, like The Wire, it doesn't show Escobar as an aberration in society but something, someone, formed by a cruel and inhumane society.

It shows how the war on drugs is always lost before it starts because drugs are a health issue, not a military one. But Narcos, at least season one of Narcos, offers no simple solution to this. Instead it shows what a fucking mess it all is. Among the classic clipboard mugshots, a waterboarding of a renegade priest that even Graham Greene may have ruled out as a little too elaborate, and the digressions into Liberation Theology and the bizarre Latin American fetishisation of Nazism (which I'd assumed was more Argentina, Brazil, and Paraguay than Colombia) we meet characters who are caught between the devil and the deep blue sea. Torn between doing the right thing and doing the safe thing.

Many of them pay with their lives, many more, in seasons two and three, no doubt are still to do so. The story of Pablo Escobar's reign is a terrible, deadly one and few come out of it well. Luckily the telling of Pablo Escobar's story, for me, at least so far, has been handled fantastically and seemingly with meticulous attention to period detail and such wonderful performances all round that to single even one out would be an injustice to any of the others. If nothing quite like the injustice that Pablo Escobar brought to bear on his home nation. I'll be back on season two before long. This Narcos stuff is quite moreish.

"Pablo's turned into a saint" - Horacio Carillo
"Claro, he sends people straight to heaven" - Roberto 'Poison' Ramos