DRAMA Vergara, as beautifully exotic as a bird of paradise, was an invaluable—and very funny—member of ABC’s Modern Family ensemble for 11 seasons. This new limited series, in which she plays notorious drug lord Griselda Blanco, puts her front and center in a major dramatic vehicle. She’s terrific.
Griselda is co-created by Eric Newman, an executive producer on Netflix’s Narcos and Narcos: Mexico, but don’t expect the grim grittiness of those shows or anything like Wagner Moura’s baggy-eyed, paunchy Pablo Escobar. Vergara wears a prosthetic nose that gives her a vaguely leonine look, but she doesn’t resemble the real Griselda, who built up and ran a Miami-based cartel in the 1970s and 1980s. At odd moments, instead, she suggests Luann de Lesseps from The Real Housewives of New York City.
Blanco loved money and drugs—people, not so much. Netting a reported $80 million a month in the peak years of her cartel, she may have been responsible for an estimated 300 murders in Miami and her native Colombia. Previously played by Catherine Zeta-Jones in the 2017 TV movie Cocaine Godmother, she was gunned down in Medellín in 2012 at age 69.
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Vergara’s performance is an irresistible star turn that never sacrifices an almost retro sense of glamour, no matter how many hit jobs Griselda orders. Using a cigarette as an elegant prop, Vergara could be in an old black-and-white Hollywood production. You can imagine her standing on a balcony, half listening to a cocktail shaker in the room behind her while a band plays a rumba below. Blanco’s life ended miserably—prison, most of her children dead, assassination— but her fate here feels more like Carey Mulligan’s as Mrs. Leonard Bernstein in Maestro: Such is a woman’s heartache!
‘Vergara’s performance is an irresistible star turn’
But so what? Vergara’s passionate physicality is magnetic—and unflagging across six episodes. If what she’s given us feels like fantasy instead of, say, a feminist Godfather, keep in mind Blanche DuBois’s line in A Streetcar Named Desire: “I don’t want realism—I want magic!” Griselda is the work of a magician. (Launches Jan. 25)
Watch these tales of women living way outside the law.
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