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ZeroZeroZero

“Powder,” Gabriel Byrne’s voiceover narration intones. “That’s all you see when you look at cocaine. But look a little closer and you’ll see an endless network: buyers, sellers, brokers, and users, invisibly tangled in our daily lives—whether we like it or not.”

Byrne neglects to mention “makers of international crime dramas for streaming television services,” but at this point it probably goes without saying. You can’t swing a kilo without hitting a series about narcotraffickers and their customers, enablers, and enemies; there are times when it seems that next to adorkable comedies, yayo is Netflix’s entire business model.

Into this crowded field charges Amazon’s ZeroZeroZero, guns blazing. Seriously: The very first time we see Byrne’s character, Edward Lynwood, he’s already lying down on the ground with a gunshot wound as shell casings and broken glass rain down around him.

However did he find himself in such a pickle?

Well, it’s a long story, and telling it is the task of this series premiere. During this introductory episode (“The Shipment”), we meet Don Minu (Adriano Chiaramida) and his nephew Don Stefano (Giuseppe de Domenico), the grandfather-and-grandson bosses of a powerful ‘Ndrangheta organized crime outfit in Calabria, Italy; Vampire (Harold Torres), a ruthless, religious cop tasked with taking down narcos in Monterrey, Mexico; and Edward and his adult children Emma (Andrea Riseborough) and Chris (Dane DeHaan), who run a legit shipping company based in New Orleans that doubles as the trans-Atlantic middleman for the trade in coke between the Italians and the Mexicans.

We also learn some secrets about each faction. Stefano, it turns out, is secretly undermining his grandfather, burning the money intended for the Lynwoods and swearing he’ll feed Gramps to his friend’s pigs.

Vampire is actually working for the cartel when he’s not staging bloody, collateral-damage-heavy shootouts with their foot soldiers; it’s his heads-up to the local narco bosses (the Leyra brothers) that enables them and the Lynwoods to (mostly) escape.

And Chris, who suffers from hearing loss brought on by incipient Huntington’s disease, chafes about being kept at arm’s length from the real family business, even as Emma argues with her dad about the wisdom of accepting a job from the Italians without the cash up front.

Based on a book by Gomorrah author Roberto Saviano, ZeroZeroZero‘s strengths are pretty much exactly what you’d expect them to be. The show makes the most of its international scope, offering plenty of local color—or at least what passes for local color on a cocaine drama, which means lots of people running for their lives in a Mexican marketplace and getting shot at in a fancy restaurant and stuff like that. A meeting between Don Minu’s men staged in a forest in the Italian countryside is especially striking, and unusual for that sort of scene. The family resemblance between DeHaan and Riseborough is pretty dead on, and even if it doesn’t quite extend to Byrne, well, hey, it’s Gabriel Byrne, are you gonna complain? (I’d be shocked if Riseborough doesn’t emerge as the show’s MVP at some point.)

The show’s weaknesses are also easy to guess. Byrne’s narration is a stew of hardboiled clichés: “Laws are for cowards, rules are for men” he says at one point, like he’s doing “Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus” for drug traffickers. The Mexican and Italian gangsters are standard-order thus far, though admittedly it’s very early in the series. The cop named Vampire has a soft spot for Jesus; he’ll get little girls killed in shootouts, but he’ll totally feel bad about it, man.

ZeroZeroZero

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Not as bad as I feel about it after watching it, though. I’m a broken record on this anytime it comes up on a television show, but here goes: Mad Men creator Matthew Weiner once told an interviewer he’d never consider killing one of Don Draper’s children, because any show in which a child dies would need to become about the death of that child, the way people’s real lives reshapes themselves around that tragedy.

Is ZeroZeroZero going to wrestle with this? Is it going to dig down deep into how it feels to know you caused the death of a kid? Or is this just a kind of detail intended to add instant gravitas and then given no more thought? I have my suspicions, yes I do.

At the very least I don’t need television’s umpteenth narco series to show me a little girl whimpering in pain and fear as blood pulses out of a hole in her neck, until eventually she dies, all on camera, which is exactly what ZeroZeroZero does. The main goal of a show like this is, let’s face it, to entertain people who want to watch people get whacked in expensive location shoots, and tossing the brutal on-screen murder of a child into the mix just so the cop character can have a sad about it is an ugly, ugly impulse. “Rules are for men”? Alright, then—that’s my rule. Break it again at your peril.