‘Narcos‘ premiered on Netflix in 2015 and turned into a global phenomenon. Wagner Moura’s portrayal of Medellín Cartel boss Pablo Escobar carried a lot of that success. Audiences spent two seasons watching Escobar build an empire of cocaine and violence. It ended with his death on a Colombian rooftop in 1993.
Networks usually stretch a hit storyline as far as it will go. They find ways to keep a popular villain around for another season. Co-creator Chris Brancato and his team never planned to do that with Escobar. His death wasn’t the end of the show. It was the end of the first chapter, and Brancato now says that chapter is closed for good.
‘Narcos’ Is More Than A Pablo Escobar Biography
Brancato built ‘Narcos’ with Carlo Bernard and Doug Miro. None of them set out to make a straight Escobar biopic. Their goal was bigger than one man. They wanted to trace the violent history of the cocaine trade as a whole, with Escobar serving as the entry point rather than the entire story.
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Executive producer José Padilha explained the thinking behind that approach directly. “The idea is to take this broad viewpoint on the history of the cocaine trade,” he said. Escobar fit that vision well. He effectively invented modern narco-terrorism. He scaled cocaine into a global business. But keeping him alive on screen past his real 1993 death would have broken the historical grounding that made the show work in the first place.
That grounding shaped every major decision the writers made about his arc. They didn’t look for ways to delay his death. They didn’t manufacture a reason to keep him around for a third season. The real timeline stayed the same, even when a longer Escobar run might have been the easier ratings play.
‘Narcos’ debuted in August 2015 and focused heavily on Escobar’s rise from small-time smuggler to billionaire kingpin. The show never treated his empire as a fixed backdrop. It traced how deliberately he built it, and that made his eventual fall carry more weight than a simple villain’s defeat would have.
The Cycle Never Actually Stops
Ending Escobar’s story at the close of Season 2 let the show make a colder point about the drug war. Law enforcement treated his death as a major win. It did not slow the cocaine trade down for a single day.
The Cali Cartel operated more like a Fortune 500 company than a street gang. It stepped in almost immediately to take over the market, and it became the focus of Season 3. Once Colombian cartels eventually fell apart, the power shifted north. That led to the spinoff series ‘Narcos: Mexico’ and its look at the rise of the Guadalajara Cartel.
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Brancato has spoken openly about how bleak that research made the show’s world feel. “It’s actually pretty depressing,” he said. “There’s always a drug cartel to move on to next.” Finishing Escobar’s story was not a risk for the show. It was the whole argument the show was making.
Kingpins die, but the business survives them. The show’s own structure, moving from Escobar to Cali to Mexico, proved that point without needing to say it outright. ‘Narcos’ wrapped its original run in September 2017. ‘Narcos: Mexico’ picked up the thread for three more seasons, carrying the same premise into a new country and a new generation of traffickers.
What Comes After Escobar
‘Narcos’ ran for three seasons and 30 episodes between 2015 and 2017. The show gave Brancato, whose earlier credits include ‘The X-Files’ and ‘Hannibal,’ the platform to build other crime dramas like ‘Godfather of Harlem’ and ‘Hotel Cocaine.’ Now he’s turning to his new series ‘The Westies,’ premiering July 12 on MGM+. Brancato told Deadline exactly where he stands on revisiting Escobar.
“One could argue every single crime show since Narcos is another iteration of Narcos,” he said. “For sure, we have a few things cooking that are in the crime genre that will give Narcos a run for its money. I specifically attended to the Pablo Escobar portion of Narcos, and that story is told, as far as I’m concerned.”
His ‘The Westies’ co-creator Michael Panes was even more direct. “After we populate Mars, maybe there will be a Narcos: Mars,” he joked. “Stay tuned for season 2. It gets even crazier.”
‘The Westies’ is based on the real Irish-American organized crime gang of the same name. It’s set in early-1980s New York as the group faces threats from inside and outside its ranks. The eight-episode series stars J.K. Simmons, Tom Brittney, Jessica Frances Dukes, and Titus Welliver, and on the surface, it shares a lot of the same DNA that made ‘Narcos’ connect with audiences in the first place.
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