Two Takes on Excellent Escapist Viewing: Netflix’s Narcos: Mexico and The Last Kingdom
What’s the perfect Thanksgiving entertainment? Football? Coco with your kids (for the 14th time)? Some brand-new prestige TV? A dysfunctional-family story or two?
If something mindless fits the bill—and you have a soft spot for action—you’re in luck. Two new delightfully non-taxing action series hit Netflix this week: Narcos: Mexico and the third season of The Last Kingdom. Be warned that both are awash in blood, but also stylish and immersive (Narcos) or wonderfully silly (Kingdom).
Narcos: Mexico is the fourth season of Netflix’s marquee drug-war series. Seasons 1 and 2 charted the rise and fall of Pablo Escobar in Colombia; last year’s third season expanded to Colombia’s Cali Cartel. Mexico is something of a reboot (and cleverly requires no grounding in what’s come before). It winds the action back to 1985 and introduces an all-new cast—notably, Michael Peña and Diego Luna as the real-life DEA agent Kiki Camarena and the drug lord he’s chasing, Miguel Ángel Félix Gallardo.
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On first blush Narcos is straightforward genre fare: tough-talking men, a drug moll or two, and guns and bullets galore. But the series has an alluring documentary texture. By filming the first three seasons on location in Colombia, with almost all dialogue in Spanish, the creators have never pandered to a late-night Saturday shoot-’em-up crowd. That goes double for the new season, which was filmed all over Mexico last year, and conjures vérité authenticity from the first frame—saturated with sun and dust. (The directors, which include the talented Andrés Baiz and Amat Escalante, know what they’re doing.) Caveat: The violence at the beginning is a little extreme and the sundry executions may put you off, but the show takes on subtlety and complexity as it tells the story of Gallardo’s rise from marijuana grower to cocaine kingpin. Peña is a credible hard-charging good guy, enticing a gang of American DEA agents in Guadalajara to follow his lead, but real credit here goes to Luna—always an appealing actor but a revelation as a villain. Think Al Pacino in The Godfather: Part II; turns out, Luna has astonishing gravity in his slight frame.
Narcos: Mexico is gorgeous to look at; but it’s serious and downbeat, too. You know where the story of the Mexican drug trade is headed (nowhere good). If what you want is pure pulp—and if you prefer swords to guns—opt instead for The Last Kingdom, the third season of which just started streaming on Netflix. The lazy gloss on this BBC series, set in 9th-century Britain and based on a series of novels by Bernard Cornwell, is that it’s a poor man’s Game of Thrones. And yes, the aesthetics are the same: furs and fortresses, gloriously tattooed pagans, bloody battles in windswept fields. But the reason Kingdom has been something of a cult pleasure since it debuted in 2015 is the way it’s pitched somewhere between solemn drama and high-camp hilarity. One senses the lead actor, the handsome Alexander Dreymon (who declares himself “Uhtred, son of Uhtred!” at the start of every episode) can barely keep a straight face.
This is a series you’ll want to start at the beginning, and Season 1 is a total delight. There are tons of characters and amusingly ye-olde location names but a fairly simple plot strings them all together. Ninth-century Britain is a battleground of invading roughneck Vikings and the devoutly Christian Anglo-Saxons trying to hold them off. Uhtred is caught between the two sides—born a Dane, he’s nevertheless sworn fealty to the Saxon King, a lead-faced David Dawson. But he’s by nature a loner, also an unbeatable swordsman and a total hunk with a soft spot for sorceresses. Season 3 adds a new one, a fantastically sadistic witch played by Thea Sofie Loch Næss (who, with her cascading Nordic blonde hair, seems better suited to a show about surfers). There’s also a Danish villain named Bloodhair thanks to his habit of . . . smearing blood in his hair. Subtlety is not The Last Kingdom’s strong suit, but I’m telling you—it’s a blast. I’m already threatening to abandon my family over the holiday to binge it to the end.
