Sofia Vergara became a star around the world for her turn as Gloria in Modern Family, the ridiculously successful American sitcom that ran for more than a decade. Now she's playing Colombian drug baron Griselda Blanco in a glitzy new Netflix crime thriller, it's hard to think of a bigger departure from the role that made her.
Griselda follows how the real-life drug kingpin (queenpin?), known as the Godmother, made it in America after arriving in Miami with just a dream, a bullet hole in her side and a kilo of cocaine in her 11-year-old son's suitcase.
Blanco's life was always going to be prime fodder for the screen with the violence, drugs, Seventies style and soundrack and a protagonist who is a fierce woman bending a man's world to her will.
There is supposedly a film of about Blanco's life in the works with J-Lo attached (let's draw a veil over 2018's Cocaine Godmother starring Catherine Zeta-Jones) but there is more than enough action and thrills to power this six-part series.
And perhaps, inevitably, the show is on Netflix, the home of the hugely successful Narcos about fellow Colombian drug lord Pablo Escobar. It's no surprise that Griselda was co-created by Narcos showrunner Eric Newman and that show's director Andres Baiz has directed all six episodes here.
In fact, the show starts with a quote from Escobar. “The only man I was ever afraid of was a woman named Griselda Blanco” the opening title card reads. But it starts at a low point for Griselda as she flees Colombia for Miami with her three kids for reasons that gradually become clear through flashbacks.
It turns out she’s running from her past entanglements, and drug cartel baddies, for whom she worked. As she seeks to establish herself in Miami, she charms, strategises, shoots and baseball bats her way to the top of the drug business in the city.
The world of Seventies and Eighties Miami is gloriously realised, with stunningly evocative design, all sleek vintage cars and eye-searingly bright colours, and an evocative soundtrack to match. Everyone is smoking all the time, only pausing to do lines of coke or shoot someone, and 90 per cent of the blokes give up buttoning their floral shirts somewhere around the navel.
This is very much a world of men in which Griselda is a complete anomaly. Just as, on the other side of the law, cop June (Juliana Aidén Martinez) is ignored and belittled by her boorish male colleagues despite being clearly the brightest spark on the force.
And wouldn’t you just know it, she has the smarts to crack the case of a drug-related murder wide open and ends up on the team created to smash the Miami drug rings and take down this mysterious new drug runner. Forget send a thief to catch a thief, here it's send an underestimated woman fighting the patriarchy to catch an underestimated woman fighting the patriarchy. Or something.
Vergara herself is superb, if completely unrecognisable under heavy prosthetics. It's a slightly disconcerting watch as you know it's her, it sounds like her, but after the two-hour daily stint in the make-up chair it's a pretty astounding transformation. It looks realistic – only occasionally like the Godmother has had a shoddy bit of plastic surgery.
It's hard to tell if she looks like the real Blanco – certainly the scant pictures on Google Images don't suggest much of a likeness – but maybe it's more to distance viewers from Modern Family's Gloria. And her charisma still shines through, this is Vergara's show 100 per cent.
She is great as the relentlessly driven Griselda, shaken yet furious when she's at the mercy of the violence that frequently erupts around her, but never slow to take revenge. Being a woman in this world may frustrate her as rival dealers refuse to take her seriously and call her "housewife", but it allows her to move unseen in building her power base and her private army.
It's impossible to take your eyes off Griselda even as she becomes worse and worse, her actions ever more unforgivable. And tension is built throughout as every time it looks like things are going well, they instantly fall apart, often in bloody ways involving weapons from guns to tennis rackets and machetes, whether lopping off a head or through a face.
The Narcos heritage mean this is a beautifully shot thrill ride, tense and violent, and Vergara really is the godmother of it all.
