Fill 1
Fill 1
December 16, 2015
Online Originals

Netflix Narcos:
 Chris Brancato Tells the Multifaceted Story of Drug Lord Pablo Escobar

Hunting for an almost legendary drug lord led Chris Brancato around the globe.

Libby Slate

Chris Brancato signed on as co-creator and showrunner for Narcos, the hit Netflix series about the hunt for Colombian drug lord Pablo Escobar, after the show was already set for the streaming service.

It has proven a fortuitous match: Brancato – who had been executive producer of NBC’s Hannibal for Narcos’ same production company Gaumont International Television – had a longstanding interest in the topic and a passion for the project, doing copious research in Los Angeles and in Colombia and writing five of Season One’s 10 episodes.

The show, which began streaming in August, was recently nominated for a Golden Globe as Best Television Series – Drama; Wagner Moura, who stars as Escobar, was nominated for his performance. 

The series depicts the high-stakes cocaine-trafficking world of Escobar and his notorious Medellin Cartel and the attempts by Colombian and United States forces, among them U.S. DEA agents Steve Murphy (Boyd Holbrook) and Javier Peña  (Pedro Pascal) to bring Escobar down; the U.S. government had become involved with the rise of the cocaine trade in this country.

The first season is set primarily in the 1980s, and ends with Escobar’s escape from prison in 1992.

“The subject matter has always been fascinating to me,” says Brancato, who had written episodes of NBC’s Law & Order: Special Victims Unit and NBC/USA’s Law & Order: Criminal Intent, serving as executive producer of the latter. “Years ago, I executive-produced a pilot, Dope, which unfortunately didn’t get picked up. I feel like I’ve come around full circle.”

Full circle, with a detour into a world of story structure unfamiliar to Brancato, who was accustomed, as he says, to “writing act breaks and not using bad language, graphic violence or sexuality. All those went out the window.”

Instead, executive producer Eric Newman and producer José Padilha noted their vision of focusing on an elite law-enforcement squad; the series would incorporate voiceover narration (by Murphy), a documentary-style approach with real-life historical footage, short tight scenes and the perspectives of various characters.

“It was a different style of writing,” Brancato says. “I had doubts about the voiceovers and the archival footage. These were new concepts to me as a television writer.”

He soon came around, and even brought up the idea that the narcos speak Spanish. Forty percent of the dialogue is in Spanish, with English subtitles. “That’s refreshing,” he says. “I would write the entire script in English and earmark which scenes were to be in Spanish. We had a translator, a man in Bogotá.”

Some phrases called for discussion: “‘The cat is out of the bag’ has no direct translation,” Brancato says with a chuckle. “Neither does ‘Screw yourself.’ We worked out those little hiccups.”

The subtitles got a unique seal of approval when the show began airing. “My fifth-and seventh-grade teachers reached out to me,” Brancato says. “They said the punctuation was good in the English subtitles!”

Before any scripts could be written, of course, there was the matter of research. “I started on the job in February 2014,” Brancato relates. “I immediately picked up every book on Pablo I could find: Killing Pablo [by Mark Bowden], books on cocaine and its effects on Colombia, books translated from Spanish to English.

“I had the life rights of Steve Murphy and Javier Peña,” he continues. “They came to Los Angeles. I asked them about their experiences being on the task force created to go after Pablo.”

In April 2014, Brancato traveled to Colombia, where he interviewed law enforcement officials who had been part of the hunt, journalists, members of the military, workers at Escobar’s estate, loved ones of Escobar’s victims and Colombian president Juan Manuel Santos, from whom he learned how Escobar’s doings still affect the country.

“That was a fascinating experience,” he recalls. “My hand got cramped writing. These people had houses blown up. At least seven people had had attempts on their lives. Their reaction was, ‘Oh, my God, they’re trying to get me!’”

Brancato returned to Los Angeles and began work with a team of writers in a process he likens to using a wood chipper, which reduces larger tree parts to wood chips: over time, he wrote memos and doled out extensive information, all added to the writers’ ideas and eventually pared down to serialized scripts. “I had a lot of help from the writers and from José Padilha and Eric Newman,” he acknowledges.

Naturally, Escobar was a complex subject. Even as he transformed Medellin into the murder capital of the world, he was regarded as a Robin Hood figure by many, helping the impoverished by funding housing projects, schools, hospitals, even soccer teams, and donating large sums of ill-begotten money.

“Many Colombians know of him, but not many know of his too-strange-to-be-believed life,” Brancato says. “He was a smuggler of liquor and cigarettes who just happened to become involved with cocaine smuggling. He ran for president of Colombia, and he actually won. At the beginning of the show, we have a saying about magical realism, that this is hard-hitting journalistic facts crossed with something too strange to believe.”

To ensure realism, retired DEA agents Murphy and Peña served as technical consultants; on-screen counterparts Holbrook and Pascal spent time at the DEA’s training academy in Quantico, Virginia. Actor Moura, who is Brazilian and doesn’t speak much Spanish, studied the language. The cast, department heads and crew were bilingual.

Brancato spent eight months filming in Colombia, where he also made frequent script revisions, working with the writers back home. “It was fascinating to shoot there – almost all were practical locations,” he says. “We got a chance to use not only a governor’s mansion, but a very, very accurate representation of a congressional hall.”

At the opposite end of the spectrum were the Medellin slums, an “extraordinary” location, he says. “They are on hillsides that offer beautiful views. Wealthy people have built homes on the land. Poor people build shacks – they have views that would cost a fortune in L.A.”

The company also shot in the jungles of Cartagena. At no time did he feel unsafe in Colombia, Brancato says; authorities had long since succeeded in reducing the drug trading, which has subsequently migrated to Mexico. And though DEA agent Murphy is the show narrator, “the Colombians are the heroes,” he adds. “I did not want this to be a gringo story.”

Brancato will not be back for the second season of Narcos: He has a two-year deal with ABC Studios and is now an executive producer of the ABC Biblical series Of Kings and Prophets, scheduled to premiere in March. As for Season One, “When I first saw the cut of the pilot, I said, ‘I don’t know if this is good, bad or indifferent, but I do know it’s different.’”

The positive response has been “gratifying,” he adds, but something he knew before embarking on the series has become even more clear:

“The consumption of cocaine in the United States is as high as it always has been,” Brancato says. “It’s our ceaseless appetite for drugs that funds the violence – in Mexico now, and in Colombia before. There are Americans using this product who don’t realize it’s covered in blood.”


Browser Requirements
The TelevisionAcademy.com sites look and perform best when using a modern browser.

We suggest you use the latest version of any of these browsers:

Chrome
Firefox
Safari


Visiting the site with Internet Explorer or other browsers may not provide the best viewing experience.

Close Window