A quote from Pablo Escobar appears on screen: “The only man I was ever afraid of was a woman named Griselda Blanco.” How, then, could you not tell her story? The team behind Narcos – writer Doug Miro, producer Eric Newman and director Andrés Baiz – which told Escobar’s own story, has seized the opportunity and run with it in the new six-part Netflix miniseries Griselda. It stars Sofía Vergara (who also executive produces) as the woman who would become a terrifying drug lord known as the Cocaine Godmother. It is the kind of bold, meaty, dramatic part that she has surely been hankering for after long ago proving her comic chops in Modern Family.
Miro plays a little fast and loose with the real-life Griselda’s narrative. The first episode opens in 1978 while she is injured and gathering up her three sons to flee her drug-dealing husband in Medellín, Colombia and move to Miami, Florida. A friend, Carmen (Paulina Dávila), who made a similar desperate journey a few years before, takes them in and gives Griselda a job at her travel agency. This is on condition that Griselda leaves cartel life behind and starts anew. Unfortunately, Griselda fled with a kilo of uncut cocaine in her bag so that she could provide for her family – and the lure of proper money, instead of a receptionist’s salary, proves too great.
