Griselda co-creator Eric Newman has explained why the team behind the crime drama omitted the titular real-life character’s death from the series, saying that her assassination “probably came mercifully” to her after a significant loss.
In an interview with Collider, Newman — the showrunner behind Narcos and Narcos: Mexico — explained why Griselda ended the way it did, despite initially planning to show how the real-life Griselda met her ultimate demise.
“When you get into her children and how she felt about them, undeniably, she loved her kids, and maybe in a sort of narcissistic personality disorder way that some people see their children as an extension of themselves, but it felt to us that the time between the death of her children and her death was likely some horrible purgatory, or worse. I think death, in some ways, probably came mercifully to her after that kind of loss and the kind of trauma that characterized her life,” said Newman.
He added, “At the same time, there were things that happened during her New York tenure with her second husband where she was a somewhat successful drug trafficker in New York. These are all things that we considered, and at one time or another they were in the story, but we really felt like the cleanest version of the story is the one where you meet her at a low point with everything at stake and nothing in the figurative bank except for a kilo of cocaine that she’s gotta sell. We’re willing to let her get away with that if she can just build a better life for her kids — all the way to ‘My kids are dead, I’ve lost decades of my life,’ and the tragedy is complete.”
What is Griselda about?
Starring Sofia Vergara as the title character, Griselda is a “fictionalized dramatization inspired by the life of the savvy and ambitious Griselda Blanco, who created one of the most powerful cartels in history.”
The rest of the cast includes Alberto Guerra as Dario Sepúlveda, Christian Tappan as Arturo Mesa, Martín Rodríguez as Rivi Ayala, Juliana Aidén Martinez as June Hawkins, and Vanessa Ferlito as Carmen Gutiérrez.
All six episodes of Griselda are now streaming on Netflix.
