Chris Brancato makes crime series out of the historical record, cutting real newsreel into invented scenes, and at his best the two lend each other weight. He builds large, well-researched stories and does not yet trust the audience to follow them without a guide.
Fi1m perspective
Every few minutes in Narcos (2015) the drama stops and the news comes on. A face Wagner Moura has just invented is followed by the actual man on the actual footage, and for a second the invented one looks smaller, which is the point. This is Chris Brancato's method: take the record, dramatise the gaps, then hold the two up against each other so the viewer knows what is real. It is a good method. It also comes with a narrator, and the narrator is the problem.
Brancato had been writing television for more than twenty years before Narcos. He started on Beverly Hills, 90210 in 1992, wrote an episode of The X-Files in 1993, created the science fiction series First Wave in 1998 and wrote the films Hoodlum (1997) and Species II (1998). There were runs on Law & Order: Special Victims Unit and Criminal Intent, and a stint as writer and executive producer on Hannibal (2013). We rate The X-Files and Hannibal highly, but they are other people's shows, and neither review has cause to mention him. In those credits he is a working writer, not an author. Hoodlum, a period crime film, is the one that points forward.
The turn came with Narcos, which he created with Carlo Bernard and Doug Miro as three runs of ten episodes, beginning in Medellín at the end of the 1970s. The research is thorough and it shows in the right way: the series treats Escobar as history rather than legend, and Moura's soft-voiced performance is reason enough to watch. The newsreel got at us more than we expected; the footage keeps reminding us that these people existed, and the acting has to earn its place beside them. Then the American narration arrives to explain what the pictures have just shown, and by the third season the series has changed its subject and is running on habit. Brancato and his partners went on to Narcos: Mexico (2018); he then created Godfather of Harlem (2019), which sets organised crime against the civil rights movement, and Hotel Cocaine (2024). We have not reviewed those and will not judge them here.
Brancato is candid about what he is doing. "Research only goes so far and we’re not writing documentaries, we’re writing dramas," he has said, and that is fair; nobody wants a footnoted Escobar. The trouble is not that he invents. It is that having done the research and cut in the record, he does not believe we have understood it, and sends a voice to make sure. It may be the habit of a long career in network television.
He is developing another period crime series, The Westies. On the evidence of Narcos, he knows how to find the story and how to stage it beside the truth. What we would like him to find next is the confidence to turn the narrator off.
Biography
Chris Brancato is an American television and film writer and producer. He grew up in Teaneck, New Jersey, graduated from Teaneck High School in 1980 and from Brown University.
He began his career as a writer and story editor on Beverly Hills, 90210 in 1992. Brancato co-wrote the The X-Files episode 'Eve', which aired in 1993. He created the series First Wave (1998–2001) and wrote the films Hoodlum (1997) and Species II (1998). Later credits include writing for Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, Law & Order: Criminal Intent and Hannibal, and co-creating Narcos (2015) and Narcos: Mexico. He has also created and written Godfather of Harlem (2019–) and Hotel Cocaine (2024).
