El Chapo

The bench is broader than that again. This is a large show with a lot of faces, and most of them are Mexican and Colombian theatre and telenovela veterans rather than international names. That texture is part of why it works.

🧠 What It's Really About

On the surface El Chapo is a cat-and-mouse procedural. Underneath it is a long, patient argument about corruption and consent. Every big move Joaquín makes in the show depends on a Mexican official looking the other way, a federal cop taking an envelope, or a governor deciding his career is worth more than someone else's life. The actual drug-running logistics are almost beside the point. The show is interested in the handshake that made the shipment possible.

This is also where El Chapo separates itself from the American cartel shows it invites comparison with. Narcos and Narcos Mexico frame the war on drugs mostly from the DEA's side, with Americans as the default point of view and Spanish as a second language. El Chapo reverses that. The DEA are peripheral. The Mexican political class is front and centre. The whole thing plays in Spanish with subtitles, and the rhythm of how business gets done in Culiacán, Ciudad Juárez and Mexico City is treated as the main subject rather than the backdrop.

It is also, quietly, a marriage story. Joaquín's relationships with Alejandra and Graciela run through the whole series and carry a lot of the emotional weight. The show is honest about what his life does to them. It is not interested in romanticising him.

🎨 Style and Atmosphere

Visually the show is workmanlike rather than flashy. The colour palette leans dusty and brown for the Sinaloa countryside, cooler greys and blues for the political interiors in Mexico City, clinical greens inside Altiplano. Wardrobe and production design get a lot of credit from people who know the era. The cowboy hats. The boots. The specific cut of a late-80s polo shirt. The ugly gold jewellery. All of it feels lifted from photographs of the real people rather than designed from scratch.

The music is mostly norteño and corridos, often diegetic, playing from the cars and the parties. There is no prestige-TV synth score leaning on your shoulder to tell you how to feel. The show trusts the scene.

Pacing is slower than a US cable drama of the same era. Some stretches of season two drag, and I found the show occasionally loses focus when it spends too long on political subplots away from Joaquín. But when it stays close to him it is steady. Patient. Properly tense on the beats that matter.

📈 Reception and Legacy

Critical reception was mixed in English-language outlets and strong in Spanish-language ones, which is a fair summary of its blind spot and its strength. English reviewers compared it unfavourably to the Netflix Narcos franchise and flagged the lower budget. Spanish-language critics and Mexican viewers were closer to the show's sensibility and rated it much higher. IMDb audience scores settled around 7.3/10 overall, higher for the first two seasons.

It ran on Univision as an event in US Latino households, then picked up a much larger audience on Netflix, where a lot of people who had only ever seen Wagner Moura's Escobar discovered that Spanish-language prestige crime drama had been going for a while. In that sense El Chapo is one of the better gateway drugs the US streaming era produced for Mexican television.

🏆 Why It Works

I came to El Chapo expecting a Univision knock-off of Narcos and left thinking it was the more honest show. It is not trying to be cinema. It is trying to tell you what actually happened, told in the language it happened in, by people who grew up near it. Marco de la O's central performance is the glue. Watchful. Still. Unhurried. If you have only ever watched American cartel television, Breaking Bad, Ozark, the Narcos run, this is a good corrective. And if you liked Gomorrah for the same reason I liked El Chapo, which is that the natives tell their own stories better than the tourists do, you will find a lot here worth three seasons of your time.

Alejandro Aguilar

Toño