The third is also a Colombian series also on Unimas, La Esquina del Diablo ("The Devil's Corner"), starring Ana Seradilla, who recently starred as Griselda Blanca in La Vieuda de Negra ("Black Widow.") Also in lead roles are the actor who played the betraying boyfriend in La Reina del Sur and the actor who played Pablo Escobar's cousin and partner Gustavo de Jesus Gaviria in Patron del Mal. Two more familiar actors are the one who played cop Norm Jones in Viuda Negra, and one who played one of Pablo Escobar's hit men in Patron de Mal. The synopsis is in Spanish, but I think Ana plays an undercover cop whose father was a cop who was murdered. She falls in love with both the lead cop who is chasing the top narco, and the top narco's right hand man. The cop has a drug problem because of a guilty secret in his past. As a teenager, he was the one who killed Ana's father. The other guy Ana falls for, the right-hand of the narco, was blamed for the murder and served 10 years.
I can't tell if any of these shows will have English subtitles or captions. If it's just captions, Xfinity subscribers may be out of luck, since their cable boxes seem to only have a caption on/off setting, with captions on Spanish shows only in Spanish when the feature is turned on. So it will be back to the indoor TV antenna, since TV sets give you the choice of showing captions in English or Spanish. The downside is there's no recording feature, so you have to watch each show while it is airing. The shows' episodes are an hour long and air 4 to 5 nights a week for around three months, so they are quite a time commitment.
Some of them, particularly El Capo I, II and III and La Reina del Sur, I've watched more than once. Why? Here's a consumer review of El Capo, which unfortunately, has no English subtitles.
El Capo is the Sopranos, the Wire, 24 and the movie Traffic all rolled into one plus more! I simply can't turn it off. The intensity is off the hook. Absolutely the best novela to come out of Colombia ever, hands down. I think it's so sad that this series doesn't have English subtitles. The audience would blow up if English-speakers could watch it and understand what's going on. As a Spanish as a second language speaker, I understand a good 95 percent of the dialog. But, I implore whoever can make this happen, please subtitle this series.
This is all just another reason I intend to get back to improving my limited Spanish. Fluenz, the program I like the best of the six or so I've tested, costs a whopping $677.00. Right now it's on sale for $299 at Amazon, but that's still a lot of money. I wish there was a Spanish language program that taught using a narco drama as a script, like Mango does with movies. (Mango is also free online if you have a library card in many cities.)
