It’s becoming increasingly hard to keep a secret in TV. Game of Thrones and other serial dramas have bred fans that comb through any casting and shooting information for clues about what the next season will bring. Only recently has Thrones been able to catch up to its adaptation source material and surprise fans of the book series, and it has led to an increased tide of criticism over its once-unanimous praise. Two new series—Mr. Robot on USA Network and Narcos on Netflix—offer alternate ways forward for how a show can remain engaging when viewers know, or can guess, what’s coming next.
From its pilot, Mr. Robot feels like Fight Club updated for millennials. Elliot (Rami Malek) works as a cybersecurity savant suffering from depression in New York, until he discovers a piece of data that lures him into a group of radical hackers tasked with taking down the world’s biggest corporation and essentially eliminating financial debt. As an elevator pitch, it’s a blessing and a curse: the 1999 film still lures in fans and detractors in equal measure. Either way, it prepares the viewer to have reality flipped late in the season as Fight Club’s infamous reveal does. While the preparation ends up justified, Mr. Robot’s payoff is not nearly so satisfying both in its predictability and its execution.
The whole season is a tightrope walk between the better influences of Fight Club (fantastic direction and acting) and the worse (poor-posing-as-edgy writing and reliance on voiceover). In the pilot, the outstandingly human introduction of Elliot’s depression is almost immediately undercut by his “gritty” treatment: he snorts morphine! Similar oscillations between the excellent and the eye-roll-inducing form an additional layer of tension on top of the plot. But perhaps the biggest twist isn’t in the show: creator Sam Esmail intended the series to be a movie and for the first season to be the first act. So rather than a guide, Fight Club serves as a setup. The consequences of the first season feel earth-scorching, but inspire confidence for new growth in the next season tasked with exploring the nature of revolution and power.
Whereas Mr. Robot feels predictable by its influences, Narcos is initially predictable by that and history. The series plots the rise of Pablo Escobar (Wagner Moura), notorious leader of the Medellín drug cartel, and the Colombian and American authorities trying to take him down. Any cursory research into the topic will let you in on a spoiler: Pablo Escobar is killed by the Colombian National Police in 1993. Furthermore, the series utilizes the trope of an opening action scene cutting to an earlier time; the viewer therefore knows that anybody in that opening scene survives until the timeline catches up, which proves to be late into the season. On top of that, early episodes are fairly reliant on standard cops-and-criminals tropes like voiceover, the “building the empire” scenes, and pairing two officers (Boyd Holbrook and Pedro Pascal) who have to learn to work together. The series seems hell-bent on becoming derivative, but at the drop of a hat subverts expectations wonderfully.
After a cliffhanger fourth episode—to the extent that those exist on Netflix—the fifth episode brings eventual Colombian President César Gaviria (Raúl Méndez) into sharp focus. With this, the focus of the series shifts from a moderately compelling chronicle into a remarkable examination of a state swallowed by conflict. While there is still the tension of characters dying, it only serves to underscore the tension of a time period in which national news anchors could be kidnapped and SUVs are given freely to families so sicarios can hide in plain sight. No one’s expressed motives can be trusted, nor can any sense of humane restraint. Like The Wire before it, Narcos lures the modern audience into a deeper and older tale; the American City via Greek tragedy, Colombia at war via magical realism. Coupled with a nuanced performance from Moura, who inhabits the dual normalcy and insanity of Escobar, the series exploits what we don’t and can’t know through a spoiler: how pervasive danger can feel.
