So, like many other people who have a Netflix account, I spent the weekend watching the second season of Narcos. And like many people, I liked it a lot. In a certain sense, this season and the previous one is very much about recent history rewriting itself (with a disclaimer acknowledging it as such) into the present day. And by doing so, such works reinvigorate a good amount of debate, like how Straight Outta Compton brought up issues related to race and police brutality.
This got me thinking about the whole show, along with other TV shows that depict the War On Drugs. Because around the time period that Narcos was set, drug dealers in entertainment came in only one flavor: pure and uncut evil, who solely existed to be defeated by heroes in a bona fide morality play. Sure, it was a hallucinogen that distorted people's perception of reality, but most people didn't care. Yes, sometimes you had antiheroes like Doughboy and Tony Montana, but those were few and far between.
This was the 80s, where cheap-jack moralizing and blatant hypocrisy for the sake of "feeling good" ruled the day. There was no better or simpler message that push out than "Say No to Drugs", even when most of the people behind the scenes were doing lines of Escobar's product whenever no one who cared was looking. Sitcoms, action movies and third-rate cop shows indeed pushed it out hard, and the public took hit after hit and clamoring for more.
This was a certainly a trend that continued through the 90s, where sitcoms like Saved by the Bell and cop shows like Law & Order were in their prime. But as time went on, and the major issues with the War On Drugs became more obvious, there were things that needed to be addressed. And this was in the era of HBO, where the threat of censorship to appease advertisers and fundamentalist moralists had significantly diminished. While numerous other shows addressed the problems on the side, The Wire was the show that made its main moral "The War On Drugs was and is a policy failure." Indeed, even though it focused on many other societal ills in a Dickensian manner (i.e. politics, education, media), the point of the show was to take the old cop-show narrative and turn it around.
Of course, The Wire is far more than just a screed against this type of government policy; after all, there is a reason why it is considered the Dark Souls of HBO programming. And to extend the analogy a little further, Narcos is more akin to Bloodborne. It is something that is set in a dark world where there are definitely monsters that must be dealt with, but the protagonists might become no better than them in the process of taking them down. And if the end of season 2 is anything to go by, there is the idea that there is a cycle that will repeat itself.
