Sofía Vergara Is Ferocious in the Otherwise Familiar 'Griselda'

By Dustin Rowles | TV | January 31, 2024 |

By Dustin Rowles | TV | January 31, 2024 |

I read a piece about the new Netflix series, Griselda, where the co-creator of Narcos, Doug Miro, said that he was “‘blown away’ by [Sofía] Vergara’s passion for the project and her understanding of what Griselda’s story said about her journey to Miami as an immigrant single mother and her fight to do well for herself and her four children.”

That’s an interesting way to frame a story about a woman responsible for the murder of dozens of people as she rose to the level of the “Black Widow” or “Godmother of Cocaine” in 1980s Miami. But it’s also the only thing that sets Griselda apart from Scarface and other similar, male-centered tales of drug lords, fictional or otherwise. It’s also ironic because she had three husbands, and her actions were directly linked to the murders of three of her four children, so she hardly did well for her kids.

Griselda did it for her family the same way that Walter White did it for his family, which is to say: That may have been the initial motivation, but it quickly took a backseat to power and wealth. That she was so often dismissed because she was a woman also contributed to that rise because ego and demands for respect are not the exclusive domains of men.

That said, with the exception of Griselda’s gender and the lip service it occasionally pays to her family, Griselda is a familiar story full of all the tropes of the genre. The story begins in Medellín, Colombia, in the 1970s. Her husband, a cocaine dealer, forced Blanco to sleep with a cartel boss in exchange for wiping out his debt, and she killed him for it and fled to Miami with one brick of cocaine to her name.

Throughout six episodes, Griselda Blanco parlays that one brick of cocaine into dozens of murders before she consolidates power as Miami’s most powerful drug lord and creates a distribution network responsible for what Wikipedia tells us is $80 million in earnings per month. As is so common in these stories, however, ego and paranoia eventually lead to her demise, which involves a female detective who — like Griselda — is overlooked and discounted because she’s a woman.

The story is not new, but Sofía Vergara manages to keep it interesting, not just because she’s playing against type but because she’s ferocious in the role. The actor best known for playing Gloria in a long-running family sitcom is convincing as a woman transformed into a monster by greed, ambition, and revenge.

It seems like in every episode — and at only six episodes, it’s still two episodes too long — Griselda is offered an impossible-to-refuse deal to get out of the business. Still, each time she declines, essentially for the same reason Mark Zuckerberg does in The Social Network: “A million dollars isn’t cool. You know what’s cool? A billion dollars.”

It also benefits from the Netflix binge model; it kept me engrossed enough to click the next button after each episode. However, given a week (or even a few hours) between episodes, I’d have probably lost interest. That said, it is precisely the kind of show that will leave viewers rushing to Wikipedia afterward to find out what’s true and what’s not- several dramatic liberties are taken. Still, there is plenty enough truth that it hardly matters. That and Vergara’s performance are reason enough to watch, even if it is far from necessary viewing.