The pleasure of the finale is in watching Vergara say goodbye to this character, whom I expect will be a career-changer for her, or at least ought to be. The fire largely extinguished, the crack pipe put down, she’s first stonily defiant, and then simply emptied out. She’s still Griselda, but you can feel that something vital isn’t there anymore. There’s no big breakdown either — it’s like someone let the air out of her, and she’s flopping along the highway at 15 miles an hour to her inevitable destination. And with that, we’ve reached ours as well, our eyes opened to Vergara’s potential and our drug-drama jones fully satiated. Not a bad outcome at all, for us anyway.

I reviewed the series finale of Griselda for Decider.

All this craziness gives Sofía Vergara her best chance yet to just go absolutely nuts on screen. The comparison that springs to mind for me is watching Jon Hamm in Fargo Season 5 after watching him in comedies for a decade. Who the hell is this terrifying maniac, this delusional tyrant plagued with paranoia and arrogance and the inability to let go of a grudge? For god’s sake, she takes a golden uzi and forces a man to strip nude and bark like a dog while forcing two other guests to fuck in front of everyone, and you believe it. It’s not funny, either, not campy, and don’t let anyone try and tell you otherwise. The show may not be going for realism, but that rage, that compulsion to humiliate and terrorize in order to feel in control? That’s real. Vergara makes it real. 

It’s kind of like once it starts coming out, she can’t make it stop — certainly not until she stops chain-smoking crack. Vergara portrays Griselda as a woman hurling herself from one experience to the next: having an off-camera threesome with Rafa Salazar’s manipulative party-girl wife Marta (a captivating Julieth Restrepo), gazing dumbstruck at the fireworks display she arranged for her suddenly estranged husband, nearly choking her best friend to death, hitting the pipe over and over, shooting up Dario’s beloved Cadillac, sexually assaulting her guests, berating her son Uber for trying to be a voice of reason like Dario, perseverating on the idea that she still has an informant in her organization despite a ruthless mass murder campaign against any potential rats, accusing virtually everyone who cares about her of being said rat…she’s mainlining first dopamine and then adrenaline to a dangerous degree. 

I reviewed episode 5 of Griselda for Decider.

Director Andrés Baiz at no point loses sight of the fact that he’s pointing his camera at Sofía Vergara. Slight prosthetics notwithstanding, she’s a stunning actor, and we’re reminded of this constantly when she’s here at her moment of triumph (at least until the last minute or so). Reclining on a sofa, luxuriating in a bath with an enormous classical nude behind her, out in the twilight tracing the orange cherry of her cigarette through the blue of the night air…It’s kind of like how you could tell how much everyone who directed Mad Men loved shooting Jon Hamm. In this role, Vergara is a person you just don’t get tired of looking at.

I reviewed episode four of Griselda for Decider.

And Sofía Vergara is terrific. I haven’t even mentioned how she’s been rendered off-model by makeup effects, particular around her jawline. She uses this at times to hide her beauty, leaning into the bulldog underbite and its accompanying air of tenacity. (The scene with the dealers, where she rallies them with a fiery speech, is a case in point.) She’s excellent at playing a woman for whom beauty has undeniably been a great advantage, but also a source of constant aggravation, harassment, underestimation, and ultimately danger. She makes Griselda seem like she needs to rotate her new nickname, “The Godmother,” in her mind a few times before she can fully believe it. And that glare at the end, ooh-wee.

I reviewed episode 3 of Griselda for Decider.

Normally, meanwhile, I’d complain about the show’s overreliance on the dull Obama-era blue-and-orange digital color scheme. (True Detective Season 4 is another offender in a trend I thought we’d left behind as a species.) Look closer, however, and you’ll see that Baiz is doing much of this in-camera. The Griselda team populates every shot with blue and orange props and costumes and set elements: shirts, jackets, dresses, walls, signs, taxicabs, the wheels of a bicycle, a painting of a beach at sunset on the wall of a hotel room at one point. I’m not saying this is Asteroid City, but nor is it just slapping a filter on top of what they shot. Thought went into this. Care went into this. It’s Something!

I reviewed the second episode of Griselda for Decider.

I didn’t know what to expect going into Griselda, beyond a general raised-hackles sense that someone was pulling a fast one by not just making a new season of Narcos already. What I got was a surprising performance in a glamorous and gory hour of TV with a banging soundtrack. You cut that kind of thing into a line on my glass table and you bet I’ll be inhaling it.

I reviewed the premiere of Griselda for Decider, where I’ll be covering the whole show. Sofía Vergara is up to something special here.