The Wire made the institution rather than the case the unit of a crime series: a season follows a police department, a port, a school system or a newspaper, and the drug trade is described as an economy with labour, management and succession. Narcos takes that frame to Colombia. It gives the cartel an organisational chart, follows the money and the politics as closely as the violence, and splits its sympathy between the police and the people they are chasing. The archive footage and voiceover are its own device; the refusal to treat the trade as a morality play is inherited.