Yeah well I wish they had a gone for a more complex social/cultural expose (The Wire) or deeper character development (Breaking Bad). To me it's just another crime series that happens to take place in an interesting setting. I lived in Medellin and was excited to see the details of the those horrible events fleshed out on screen but the whole thing felt rushed and glossed over.
They should have gone into the nitty gritty details of the Colombian drug trade, and life in the city/communas pre and post Pablo. They kind of just present Pablo as a smuggler then fast forward to him being a drug lord. In The Wire you had Bubbles, Hamsterdam, the chess game with Wallace and D'Angelo - where was that crucial contextualization?
Better characters, especially the gringos. The American military and DEA characters were so brutal, they were like caricatures of cop stereotypes, the main narrator especially. They def needed a narrator to help move the story along in that many episodes but it should have been a Colombian police, not that white knight fuck boy. The only interesting characters were Pablo, Poison, Pena and Gacha.
This show should have been 3 seasons - 1 about the narcos/narcoculture, 1 from the cop perspective and their hunt, and 1 about the civil war and it's effects on Colombian society/politics/culture/day to day, etc. That last point is the one I feel is overlooked the most, because it is the civilians who suffered the most from all that shit. Fair play to them for showing real shots though.
