Netflix’s first season of Narcos arrived on August 28, 2015, carrying ten episodes and a single, enormous subject: Pablo Escobar, the Colombian drug lord who built the Medellín Cartel into a cocaine empire and turned a country into a battlefield. The show was created by Chris Brancato, Carlo Bernard and Doug Miro, and it was shot in Colombia. It is not a subtle piece of television. It is a blunt, fast, often riveting one.
The series opens with Escobar already rising, and it follows the DEA agents sent to stop him. Pedro Pascal plays Javier Peña, one of the two American narcotics officers at the center of the hunt. The show’s structure is part police procedural, part war chronicle, and it moves between the cartel’s inner circle and the men trying to dismantle it.
Trailer, via Netflix.
Pablo Escobar and the Medellín Cartel
Escobar is the engine of the first two seasons. The show presents him as a billionaire through cocaine production and distribution, a man who buys loyalty with money and enforces it with violence. The Medellín Cartel is the machine he runs, and the series spends its first twenty episodes tracing how that machine works and how it breaks down.
This is familiar ground. Escobar has been the subject of documentaries, books and other dramas. Narcos does not pretend to discover him. What it does instead is treat the cartel as an organization — a business with logistics, rivals and a payroll — rather than a single monster. That choice gives the early seasons their momentum.
The show also gives screen time to the opposition: DEA agents, rival drug lords, and the various entities that lined up against Escobar. Some of that is textured. Some of it is thin. But the series understands that a man like Escobar cannot be explained without the apparatus around him, and it mostly keeps its eye on that apparatus.
Season 3 and the Cali Cartel
Season 3 picks up after the fall of Escobar. The DEA now turns to the Cali Cartel, the other major Colombian trafficking organization, and the show resets its cast of villains accordingly. Damián Alcázar plays Gilberto Rodríguez Orejuela. Francisco Denis plays Miguel Rodríguez Orejuela. Alberto Ammann plays Pacho Herrera. Pêpê Rapazote plays Chepe Santacruz Londoño. Matias Varela plays Jorge Salcedo.
The third season premiered on September 1, 2017. It is, in some ways, a harder season to sell. Escobar was a known quantity; the Cali bosses are not, and the show has to build their menace from scratch. It largely succeeds, though the season lacks the single gravitational pull of the first two.
The supporting cast across the run includes Arturo Castro as David Rodriguez, Michael Stahl-David as Chris Feistl, Matt Whelan as Daniel Van Ness, Andrea Londo as Maria Salazar, Manolo Cardona as Eduardo Sandoval and Natalia Jerez as Aura. Pascal’s Peña is the thread that holds the whole thing together, and he is the closest thing the series has to a consistent moral center.
The DEA’s War and Its Limits
The DEA agents in Narcos are not presented as heroes in any simple sense. They are professionals in a war they did not design and cannot fully control. The show is interested in the gap between American intention and Colombian reality, and it returns to that gap again and again.
That is the smartest thing about the series. It does not pretend the drug war was a clean contest between good and evil. It shows the cost on the ground, the corruption, the compromises. It also shows how the DEA’s mission kept expanding as one cartel fell and another rose.
Where Narcos stumbles is in its pacing. Ten episodes per season is a lot of ground, and the show sometimes fills it with procedure that does not advance much. The narration, which runs through the series, is a crutch. It explains what the images could have shown.
Still, the show’s best sequences have a real charge. The hunt for Escobar, in particular, is staged with a sense of mounting pressure that most crime dramas never manage.
Ranking the Three Seasons
The three seasons are not equal, and the order matters.
- Season 2 — the strongest run, with Escobar cornered and the show at its most focused.
- Season 1 — the foundation, ten episodes that set the table and introduce the machine.
- Season 3 — the reset, ambitious but less gripping without its central figure.
That ranking is not a knock on Season 3. It is a statement about how much of the series’ power came from Escobar himself. Once he is gone, Narcos becomes a different show, and a slightly lesser one.
What Happened After Season 3
Netflix renewed Narcos for a third and fourth season on September 6, 2016. But the fourth season did not happen as planned. On July 18, 2018, the directors announced that season 4 would instead reset as season 1 of a new Netflix original series, titled Narcos: Mexico.
That new series was released on November 16, 2018, and it is set in Mexico in the 1980s. It is a separate show with a separate story, not a continuation of the Colombian arc. The decision to reset rather than continue is the right one, even if it leaves the original series feeling unfinished in a way that is hard to ignore.
The Colombian story ends with the Cali Cartel, and it ends without a clean resolution. That is honest, at least. The drug war did not end when Escobar died, and Narcos does not pretend otherwise.
The Case for 7.7
Narcos is a good series with a clear ceiling. It is well acted, particularly by Pascal, and it is directed with a steady hand. It takes a story most viewers think they already know and finds a workable angle on it: the cartel as an institution, the DEA as a bureaucracy at war.
But it is not a great series. The narration is overused. The pacing sags in the middle of each season. The Cali arc never reaches the heights of the Escobar arc, and the show’s interest in procedure sometimes crowds out its interest in people.
The published critical score is 7.7 out of 10, with a Metacritic score of 77 out of 100. That feels right. Narcos is a solid, watchable, occasionally excellent crime drama that never quite becomes the definitive treatment of its subject. It is worth the thirty episodes. It is not worth pretending it is more than it is.
What matters most here is the casting of Pascal and the decision to treat the cartels as organizations rather than as folk devils. What matters least is the narration, which the show would have been better without. The first two seasons are the ones to watch. The third is a respectable epilogue.
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