The appeal of psychopaths

Ever since the end of Gomorrah season four (Sky Atlantic) I have been bereft. I eked it out for as long as I could, going whole weeks without watching an episode — rationing it and savouring it as you do when you’re down to your last Rolo. But eventually I could put off the climax no longer, I watched them all die — as everyone always does in Gomorrah, so I’m not spoiling anything — and now I’m on the hunt for a substitute.

So far the most obvious candidate is Narcos: Mexico season two (Netflix). This contains most of the same key ingredients: bling, convoys of vehicles ripe for ambush, drugs shipments, betrayal, tense stand-offs that could end up either in extreme violence or a cunning, game-changing new arrangement, torture, etc. But it does suffer from one major flaw which you keep having mentally to edit out to stop it becoming too annoying: the wretched bloody voiceover.

It belongs to a Drugs Enforcement Administration (DEA) agent, whose cool, world-weary, insinuating drawl invites you to believe that this is another true-life cops and criminals procedural about bad guys being tracked down and outwitted and eventually getting their just deserts from good ol’ US law enforcement. But actually, as a viewer you’re really not that interested in the angry, vengeful, bitter, scruffy, boring, worthy, undifferentiable DEA agents and their petty schemings. Your heart is with the more glamorous drugs kingpins — in the first two Narcos series, with Pablo Escobar; in the two Mexico spin-offs with Felix Gallardo.

As the Narcos franchise draws closer to the present, I can see that it might become increasingly hard to find common cause with baddies so psychopathically evil that, these days, they seem to torture, massacre and behead at the drop of a hat.