Editor’s note: The below interview contains mild spoilers for Griselda.

The Big Picture

Sofia Vergara approached Eric Newman with the idea of playing Griselda Blanco in an adaptation, though Newman says he had known about Griselda through his research for Narcos. The decision to have only six episodes was practical, as it allowed one director to handle the entire series. It also worked well for Vergara, who had other commitments, including being a host on America’s Got Talent. The Netflix series focuses on a specific arc of Griselda’s tragic story. While there were other events in Griselda’s life, the creators felt a clean and focused narrative was the best approach.

Once you discover the names of the creative team behind Netflix’s newest crime drama miniseries Griselda, you have a much better sense of exactly what you’re in for with this show. Alongside co-creators Doug Miro, Carlo Bernard, and Ingrid Escajeda, as well as director Andrés Baiz, Eric Newman has been telling stories in this particular world for a while now. Shows like Narcos and its Mexico spin-off, both of which found critical acclaim, have only paved the way for a more intimate look into the lives of the cocaine underworld’s most complex figures. In short, perhaps a show about Griselda Blanco, played by Sofía Vergara (herself a producer on this project) was only really a matter of time.

Griselda has been long in the making, according to Newman, who says that Vergara herself came to him with the idea of playing the drug queenpin while he was working on the second season of Narcos in 2015, but it would still be several more years before Netflix was confirmed to be attached in production in 2021. Ahead of the show’s premiere, Collider had the opportunity to speak with several people who were involved in turning Griselda from concept into reality, including Newman. Over the course of the interview, which you can read below, the series producer explains the reason behind the miniseries’ episode count, why they decided to end the show where they did, and more.

Griselda Fleeing from Medellín to Miami, Griselda Blanco creates one of the most ruthless cartels in history. Release Date January 25, 2024 Creator Eric Newman, Carlo Bernard, Ingrid Escajeda, Doug Miro Cast Sofia Vergara , Alberto Guerra , Juliana Aidén Martinez , Martin Rodriguez , Jose Velazquez , Orlando Pineda Main Genre Crime Seasons 1 Streaming Service(s) Netflix

Sofía Vergara Wanted to Play Griselda Blanco From the Beginning
Image via Netflix

COLLIDER: This isn’t the creative team’s first venture into this specific world, but how far back did the development process start? Was this while Narcos was in the stratosphere, that you were thinking about the show?

ERIC NEWMAN: So I got a phone call from Sofía [Vergara] in 2015, and I think at the time I may have been editing the second season of Narcos. She called me and had me come over, and she and Luis Balaguer, her partner in LatinWe Entertainment, sat me down, and she said, “I want to play Griselda Blanco.” I knew a lot about Griselda because I had encountered her in my research on Narcos and I found her an incredibly compelling character. She’s the only woman in the entire Latin American trafficking sphere who rose to that level of prominence there. Despite claims to the contrary, she’s the only one. That in itself was so unique, and in some ways, knowing what I know about that culture, how male-dominated it is, it was kind of confusing to me.

So, I’d been drawn to the character way back to my earliest research in the early 2000s for what became Narcos, but I never found a way to incorporate it into how we tell the story in Narcos — much more diffused a 90,000-foot view. Griselda requires a much more focused telling, not just to highlight Sofía’s spectacular performance, but just to live in the intimacy of this story, and to allow an audience to connect with a single mother, an immigrant who’s trying to do the best for her kids and gets lost. That is the tragedy in this story. Narcos, I love, I’m incredibly proud of it, but I’m very proud of the evolution as storytellers, what Andy [Baiz] and Doug [Miro] and myself and Ingrid [Escajeda], what we were able to do in shifting the way we tell these stories.

Why Is ‘Griselda’ Only Six Episodes?
Image via Netflix

Speaking of telling a focused story, telling something that’s more contained, was that part of the reason behind this particular episode count? When you get to the last episode, you kind of feel like there could still be more.

NEWMAN: There’s a practical concern, which is I’ve worked with a lot of directors, some great directors. My partnership with Andy Baiz, who directed about 24 episodes of Narcos, of our 60, and who directed all six of these episodes, I value it — Zack [Snyder] and Andy are my favorite filmmakers to work with. Six episodes is about all that one director can handle if you look at the length and prep required to make [them]. Not that that dictated it, but I definitely did feel like I wanted to make sure we could do this show as one unit throughout.

Obviously, it’s a lot of work for Sofía. She’s in almost every scene. She’s in three hours of makeup every day, and she’s also a host on America’s Got Talent, so we were limited by our production window. Do I wish there were more episodes? I always wish there were more episodes. I feel like we had a very good beginning, middle, and end for the right story that’s the arc of the tragedy. “I wanna do right by my kids,” to “I lost my kids,” basically. I’ve never made a movie or a TV show where I didn’t wish there was more. It would have been great to [have] seven episodes, eight episodes, even 10 episodes, but I’m pretty happy with the six we have.

Talking about bookending the show where you have it, those people who know the real story know that there are events that happen before the beginning of the show, and there are events that take place, including her death, after where the show ends. Did you ever consider shifting the timeline at all, leaning into those later years and telling that story?

NEWMAN: We had a few moments. In the earliest days when it was just me and Doug in an office above Narcos just kind of mapping out what the show was gonna be, we had a version that started with getting this old woman walking down the street in Medellín getting machine-gunned, and presenting the sort of dramatic question of, “What could this be?” It was almost like Hemingway’s The Killers. Whatever happened, what made this person this hated? And then going back and telling the story.

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.

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.

Griselda is currently available to stream on Netflix.

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