T w e n t y S i d e d

Narcos tells the story of the drug war between the Colombian government and a series of Colombian drug lords, with a handful of Americans acting as our main characters even if they weren’t of central importance to the events in question. The show is shot on location, in Spanish, with proper period clothing / technology / cars. This gives the show an incredible level of verisimilitude, even before you realize that it’s all based on real events.

How can you tell which parts are real and which are Hollywood fiction? Easy. The parts that flow like a proper story with character arcs, suspense, and intrigue are fiction, and the cartoonishly implausible stuff about the cartels is real.

The first two seasons told the story of Pablo Escobar, and that guy is where most of the really strange stuff comes from. The guy was basically The Joker, let loose in a world without Batman. Or maybe he was a James Bond supervillain in a world without a James Bond.

The closest thing we have to a super-spy in this story is the morally compromised and profoundly cynical CIA agent Bill Stechner. He’s not here to stop the cartels, he’s here to enforce the ever-shifting will of the US State Department. He’s good at his job and you get the feeling he’s done some really ugly shit in his life, but he’s not the hero and he’s nowhere near being a main character. Like so many fascinating personalities in this story, he’s lurking on the edges of the action and making you wonder how much of him is based on real people or stories.

This isn’t a simplistic story about Escobar vs. The Cops. This story is fractal. At a high level you’ve got the cartels, the USA, and Colombia. But the “Cartels” are a conglomerate made of organizations made of families made of gangs. The USA is likewise made up of different factionsThe military, the CIA, and the DEA. that engage in a lot of infighting. Colombia is a complex country with different economic, geographical, and political groups. Nobody’s 100% a saintAlthough Colombian president César Gaviria comes out looking pretty good. I often wonder what Colombians think of his portrayal on the show. and nothing is clear-cut. The fight against Escobar was a never-ending string of trolley problems mixed with the prisoner’s dilemma mixed with a version of the sunk cost fallacy based on human lives instead of money.

Continue reading ⟩⟩ “TV I’m Watching: Narcos”

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.

A few weeks ago someone asked if I was watching any TV. At the time I said I was watching one show. It turns out this is not remotely true.

I lost interest in television back in 2001 or so. I was sick of the commercials and not interested in planning my entertainment around TV schedules. Besides, TV was expensive and the internet was way more interesting. So we canceled our cable service and that was the last I saw of television for the next decade and a half.

But now? Now “television” is on-demand streaming. Our family subscribes to several streaming services: Amazon Prime, Hulu, Drama Fever, Crunchyroll, and Netflix. Combined, they cost us about what cable TV cost back in 2001. The difference is now we don’t have to put up with commercialsActually Hulu has some commercials and schedule annoyances. I’m not sure anyone still watches it. We should probably cancel it., we can watch when we want, and the overall quality of the content is quite a bit better.

Which means TV (assuming we can still sloppily refer to streaming shows as “TV”) is really different now. In the old days if I said “I watch the A-Team” it meant I had my ass in front of the TV on Tuesday nights. Now if I tell you I watch some particular show, it means I binge through a dozen hours of it once a year. That’s still really strange to me. Like, that’s breaking a 70 year old tradition. To me, the change in viewing habits seems stranger to me than the new methods of delivery. When I was a kid I might have predicted a world of bigger screens, flatter displays, sharper images, better production values, and a shift in cultural standards regarding violence, language, and nudity. But the entire idea of “timeslots”? I figured that concept was as timeless as book binding. That’s just how you deliver that sort of content.

But here we are. Timeslots are dead. That’s pretty cool.

There is one show I’m watching “now” in the sense that I’m actually watching it recently, as opposed to “I’ll binge on it when the next season drops”. The Great British Bake Off.

Continue reading ⟩⟩ “TV I’m Watching: Great British Bake-Off”

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.