Netflix’s 'Griselda' May Be a One-And-Done Deal
*WARNING: This post contains spoilers about Griselda.*
NETFLIX'S GRISELDA IS only six episodes but feels longer. It packs enough cocaine-fueled assassinations, prison phone sex, and Sofia Vergara facial transformations to satisfy multiple binges. With so much death and destruction, the Colombian drug lord leaves very little in her powdered wake, and that may not include a second season.
While the real Griselda Blanco story is more devastating than the Netflix limited series, Griselda still straps you into an emotional rollercoaster. The series has highs that can make your heart feel like it's ready to jump out of your chest and lows that feel like your eyes are being wrung out of all the tears they have. For her first dramatic starring role, Vergara delivers her most dynamic performance as the ferocious Colombian drug lord. She's been open about her personal connection to the Griselda story, noting how she was raised in Colombia during Blanco's terror reign and lost her brother to the drug trade. If it was hard to discern which parts of her portrayal were her and which parts were her acting as Blanco, it's because recreating Blanco's life became too real to escape.
"It was a lot of stress and a lot of work that I had to do behind the scenes. And I think by episode five, I totally became a monster, and Griselda did too," she told CBS News.
By the end of the season, Blanco had devolved into a reluctant tyrant who inadvertently murdered a two-year-old boy, frightened her own children with her cruelty, and couldn't see the bigger picture through the haze of crack cocaine. Her story doesn't have a happy ending, but does that mean the story ends with this one season?
How does Griselda end?
Karma can't be paid off with drug money or killed by motorbike drive-by shootings, which Blanco is credited with inventing. At the end of Griselda, Blanco's wicked steps to the top of the drug game set her on a path where she would lose everything. After her drug-induced paranoia caused her to threaten to kill Dario Sepulveda (Alberto Guerra), the father of her youngest child, Michael Corleone Blanco (Benson D. Larracuente), Sepulveda took their son and fled to Colombia to escape Blanco's wrath. He told her he was doing this over the phone after she frantically tried to explain how the Ochoa cartel was out to get her, and her close friend Carmen (Vanessa Ferlito) began cooperating with the Miami Police Department after Blanco tried to choke her to death.
With the walls closing in on her, she chose self-preservation over her life on the run by surrendering to the police so that she could spend years in prison rather than be killed by the Ochoas. Her life as the queen of a multi-billion dollar cocaine operation was done, but not before she orchestrated one final murder. She sent a few of her henchmen to Colombia to take her son Michael back to her and kill Sepulveda in the process. Later in the episode, some litigious phone sex from her trusted assassin Rivi (Martín Rodríguez) with one of the district attorney's assistants led to Blanco's prison sentence dropping to seven years. She could return to her children before they knew it.
Unfortunately for her, stories like hers rarely get anything resembling happy endings. Seven years later, near the end of her sentence, Blanco is visited by June Hawkins (Juliana Aidén Martinez), the former Miami police officer who obsessed over her capture before arresting her. With Blanco's hair greyed by time, Hawkins informs her that three of her sons—Dixon (Orlando Pineda), Uber (Jose Velazquez), and Ozzy (Martín Fajardo)— were all murdered. At the end of the show, an epilogue is provided that details how she returned to Medellín, Colombia, after her release, where she was eventually murdered in 2012 at the age of 69.
Will there be a Season 2 of Griselda?
Any hope of a Season 2 likely died when Blanco did. Even though Griselda was set to be a limited series, and the epilogue kills any suspense of how her story ends, that doesn't have to preclude an exploration into her final years. Anyone with Google could've found out Griselda Blanco died 10 seconds after Netflix announced the series was being made, but that didn't stop them from telling the stories that led up to her demise.
As of this publication, Griselda was the most-watched TV series on Netflix from the week of January 22-28, with over 113,000,000 hours watched. With that much success, ruling out a return to the Griselda drug empire would be misguided. However, no indication is that we will see Vergara as Griselda Blanco again on Netflix for Season 2.
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