"Okay, here we go again." With that drawled voice-over, Narcos is back. Last year, the Netflix series covered Pablo Escobar's dizzying, coke-powered rise to power. Now, we get to watch him fall.
For the uninitiated: Narcos is all about heists, cocaine, and a whole lot of camera filters. It's not prestige TV, even when just about everything else is, but it can be a great time. The question on my mind is whether the show can keep up its many grim thrills. Any story about a criminal's rise and fall has to face what you might call the Goodfellas problem: These things are always more fun when anti-heroes are on their way up, when they surround themselves with women and lots of consequence-free drug use. The fall from grace, when the (possibly) chastened protagonist shuffles between safe houses and prison cells, usually doesn't offer the same excitement.
There's a material challenge, too. While the first season of Narcos pulled from decades of Escobar's life and the Colombian drug trade, this season only has a year's worth of history to mine. When all these deficiencies come together, the future doesn't look so promising.
When last we left our drug lord, Pablo and his Medellín Cartel were wrapping up a series of bombings aimed at preventing the Colombian government from extraditing cartel leaders to the United States. Facing pressure from both the DEA and the more sophisticated Cali Cartel, Escobar still had enough juice left to cut a cushy deal with the government that allowed him to build his own prison, stock it with his guards of his choosing, and basically settle down to a comfortable house arrest. Not too shabby, all things considered.
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