Griselda shows that drug dealing on screen is becoming as thrilling as a tax return

Netflix’s latest miniseries looks at the story of Griselda Blanco, the Colombian drug baron who took over the Miami cocaine scene in the 1980s. It’s nothing but crime story clichés, says Louis Chilton – when did drug dealing become so tedious to watch?

The legend of Griselda: Sofia Vergara as drug baron Blanco in Netflix’s new miniseries (Netflix)

Are you after a fast, buzzy TV premise? Just dig out the razor blades and powered sugar – and come up with a story about dealing cocaine. From Scarface to Top Boy to Narcos, the illegal drug trade has been an endless source of fascination across film and TV. It is a story that has been told and retold: the frenzied rises and antic collapses of empires built on powder.

The latest project to fit this mould is Griselda, a six-part Netflix drama focusing on the real-life crimes of Griselda Blanco (Sofía Vergara), a Colombian woman who moved to Miami in the 1980s and built a drug trafficking empire. Griselda has shot to No 1 in the streaming service’s charts, and has prompted no small amount of praise for Vergara. (Known for her comic roles, in particular Modern Family’s more-than-just-a-trophy-wife Gloria Delgado-Pritchett, Vergara is acting here against type and under prosthetics.) On the surface, the series is exactly the kind of lurid, attention-grabbing drug narrative that has enraptured viewers for decades. It’s got all the snorting and shooting of Tony Montana, with a more contemporary girlboss undertone. So why, then, is Griselda so tiresome?

Vergara’s series has exposed an unfortunate truth about these stories: the selling of drugs simply isn’t that interesting to watch. Even if you take into account the thrills that accompany it – fights, power grabs, gangland assassinations, all of which Griselda features – there’s something all a bit rote about the archetype. The best and most interesting drug-trade narratives have always sought to do something different with the genre. The Wire handled drug dealing with a prosaic realism, a lens through which to scrutinise the city of Baltimore’s systemic socio-political failings. Breaking Bad was, in some ways, a conventional rise-and-fall morality tale but the specifics of its making – from its chemistry-teacher-turned-crook premise to the eccentric twists, to its one-of-a-kind visual language – elevated it far beyond this. Griselda, meanwhile, walks the path of cliché, hitting familiar crime beats without ingenuity or particular flair.

There is little here to distinguish Griselda from its forebearers. Episode one includes its fair share of queasy drama; the constant threat – and, on more than one occasion, actualisation – of violence culminates in a bloody shootout near the episode’s end, a quintessential drug deal gone awry. It’s loud and sensational but doesn’t really excite. Like most everything else in Griselda, there is no real depth of meaning to what happens. No sense of surprise. No significance beyond lifting us up onto the next rung in the rise-of-a-drug-kingpin ladder. As is too often the case with stories that plumb news headlines for inspiration, Griselda becomes simply a purposeless run-through of a life story. The fact that Blanco’s life story was punctuated with killings and cocaine doesn’t make it any more compelling. We are watching things happen for the sake of it.

Perhaps the blame, or some of the blame, must rest with the miniseries format, which does stories like that of Griselda no favours. Part of the appeal of rise-and-fall crime stories is the propulsion: the shorter lifespan of a feature film allows for this sense of narrative dynamism. Think of Scarface, or Goodfellas – the manic, gripping ways in which the protagonists’ lives unravel. In Griselda, triumph and comeuppance are dragged out and split apart; we grow tired – or I did, at least – of awaiting the inevitable.

Whatever the series’s merits, Vergara deserves a certain amount of plaudits for stepping out of her comfort zone here. It would just be nice if Griselda were willing to try that too.

‘Griselda’ is available to stream now on Netflix