Which is why the fourth season of the series, dubbed “Narcos: Mexico,” is such a next-level improvement. For the first three seasons of Narcos, this narrative imbalance prevented the show from reaching the upper echelons of prestige TV.
While the many faces of the Cali Cartel didn’t have a presence like Escobar’s, their half of Season 3 still provided overwhelmingly more thrills than Peña’s solo act.
The third season-which left Escobar behind to focus on the Cali Cartel and also saw Murphy exit, with Peña taking over as the chief DEA protagonist and series narrator-didn’t do enough to balance the scales, either. At its best, his narration provided essential context with knowing humor at its worst, it made the show feel more like a Ken Burns documentary than a crime drama.
Murphy’s biggest contribution was his work as Narcos’ narrator, telegraphing events as we saw them flash across the screen. Escobar was transfixing-from the height of his power as a billionaire to his final days as a disgraced man holed up in a nondescript apartment, abandoned by almost everyone.īut Escobar was only one side of Narcos’ first two seasons, and the problem was that the other half, devoted to DEA agents Steve Murphy (Boyd Holbrook) and Javier Peña (Pedro Pascal), wasn’t particularly interesting-especially when compared with the flamboyance of Escobar. Thanks to Wagner Moura’s Golden Globe–nominated work, we were pulled into Escobar’s orbit through the man’s complex, often contradictory psychology his aspirations for the Colombian presidency amid his plotting to assassinate a presidential candidate his emotional outbursts and impulsive, violent behavior, sometimes carried out by Escobar while wearing an absurdly extravagant hat. Of course, the early seasons of Narcos wouldn’t be nearly as absorbing without Colombian kingpin Pablo Escobar. But what makes the Netflix series so irresistible and capable of avoiding a feeling of staleness are its characters. Because history repeats itself, Narcos is destined to repeat itself. The storytelling cycle that’s become a hallmark of Narcos-the rise of a drug lord, the plucky DEA agents with the considerable and arguably futile task of trying to stop them, the corruption and bribery eroding political systems, the soul-rotting excess of exorbitant wealth and power-is born out of the show’s loose devotion to charting the course of actual history.
Four seasons in, Narcos isn’t shaking up its formula so much as it’s modifying it in compelling ways.