Drug Lords

The Myth and the Machine: How Drug Lords Turns Criminals Into Cartoons

I’ve watched enough true-crime documentaries to know the rhythm by now: the grainy archival footage, the ominous narration, the inevitable reenactments where actors with bad wigs scowl at each other in dimly lit rooms. Drug Lords, Netflix’s 2018 series about the rise and fall of history’s most infamous kingpins, doesn’t break that mold so much as it perfects it—like a factory assembly line for criminal mythology. And that, I think, is the problem. The series opens with Pablo Escobar, because of course it does. There’s no other way to begin a story about drug lords. Escobar is the ur-text, the man who turned cocaine into a global industry and himself into a folk hero, a monster, a martyr—depending on who you ask. The first episode (and, from what I can gather, much of the series) leans heavily into the mythos, presenting Escobar not just as a man but as a force of nature, a hurricane with a mustache. The problem isn’t that the series glorifies him; it’s that it can’t seem to decide whether it wants to humanize him or turn him into a cartoon villain.

That tension—between man and myth—is where Drug Lords stumbles. The series is structured like a true-crime procedural, with each episode dedicated to a different kingpin (Escobar, then presumably others in Season 1, followed by more in Season 2). The format is familiar: talking heads, archival footage, dramatic reenactments, and a narrator who sounds like he’s auditioning for the role of "Gravelly Voice of Doom." It’s the same formula that’s made true crime such a lucrative genre, and Netflix, with its algorithmic precision, knows exactly how to package it. But familiarity breeds complacency, and Drug Lords often feels like it’s going through the motions, more interested in ticking boxes than in asking hard questions. Take the reenactments, for example. They’re the weakest link in most true-crime docs, and Drug Lords is no exception. The actors—listed in the credits but never identified on screen—are tasked with bringing these larger-than-life figures to life, but the writing and direction give them little to work with. The dialogue is stilted, the staging is static, and the performances often veer into caricature. It’s as if the series is afraid to let these men (and they are, almost exclusively, men) be anything other than one-dimensional monsters or tragic antiheroes. There’s no room for nuance, no attempt to grapple with the contradictions that make figures like Escobar so fascinating. He was a man who built hospitals and ordered massacres, who was beloved by the poor and feared by the powerful. Drug Lords touches on these dualities, but it never digs deep enough to make them feel real. The series fares better when it leans into its archival footage. There’s something undeniably compelling about seeing Escobar in his prime, surrounded by adoring crowds, or watching the grainy footage of his eventual downfall. These moments feel raw, unfiltered, like glimpses into a history that’s still unfolding. The problem is that Drug Lords often undercuts its own footage with heavy-handed narration.