Television series

ZeroZeroZero

Name: ZeroZeroZero
Genre: Drama, Crime, Thriller
Released: 2020
Cast: Dane DeHaan, Andrea Riseborough, Giuseppe De Domenico, Harold Torres, Francesco Colella

ZeroZeroZero follows one shipment of cocaine from a Mexican jungle lab to a Calabrian mountain village, bouncing between a shady American broker family, a cartel enforcer, and an 'Ndrangheta clan tearing itself apart. It's glossy, brutal, and unashamedly cinematic — a prestige crime saga crossed with a global supply-chain thriller. For anyone who wants the drug trade told widescreen, multilingual, and merciless.

TVMaze rating

7.9

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Narcos2015

The show that built the modern cartel-drama template — Escobar's rise told with the same appetite for scale, violence and political rot ZeroZeroZero has, but with more room to breathe.

But The English-language voiceover narration can feel clunky, and later seasons lose some of the original's focus.

Gomorra: La Serie2014

Same continent, same 'Ndrangheta-adjacent underworld (Naples' Camorra this time), shot with the same unblinking, unglamorous camera. If you liked the Italian half of ZeroZeroZero, this is the mothership.

But It's relentlessly bleak with almost no relief — five seasons of people making terrible choices and paying for them.

The Wire2002

The originator of the 'follow the product, follow the systems' school of crime drama — patient, structural, obsessed with how institutions rot around a drug economy.

But It's a slow burn with a huge cast and no hand-holding; the first season demands real patience.

The wildcard

Something you would not have found on your own.

The French Connection1971

Both are essentially about the mechanics of a shipment — this film is the great-grandfather of every 'follow the product' drug story that came after, including ZeroZeroZero.

Before global cartels and satellite tracking, there was this: a grimy, real-feeling New York procedural about two cops chasing a heroin shipment across a city that doesn't want to give up its secrets.

But It's slower and scrappier, and the era's racial politics show — a product of its time in ways ZeroZeroZero, made decades later, carefully avoids.

Traffic2000

Soderbergh's multi-strand drug-trade film cuts between a judge, a trafficker's wife and a DEA agent — the same globe-spanning, morally exhausted structure as ZeroZeroZero, compressed into two hours.

But The colour-coded segments and early-2000s style may feel dated next to the show's slicker aesthetic.

Sicario2015

Villeneuve's cartel thriller trades plot complexity for pure dread — a masterclass in tension that matches ZeroZeroZero's willingness to sit inside real menace instead of cutting away from it.

But It's narrower in scope, focused on one operation rather than the whole supply chain, and light on family drama.

McMafia2018no page yet

Another Sky Atlantic-style global crime saga, following a Russian-British banker's son dragged into organised crime — glossy, multinational, as interested in money as in violence.

But It's cooler and more restrained than ZeroZeroZero, sometimes to the point of feeling emotionally distant.

Breaking Bad2008

The other essential drug-trade drama, but from ground level — a chemistry teacher's slow corruption instead of a global family business. Still one of the best character studies TV has produced.

But Totally different scale and tone — intimate and blackly comic where ZeroZeroZero is operatic and grim.

Snowfall2017

Traces the crack epidemic's roots back to CIA-adjacent cocaine trafficking in 1980s LA — a smaller, streetier companion piece to ZeroZeroZero's high-altitude view of the same trade.

But Pacing is uneven across its run, and it never quite finds the confidence of its early seasons.

American Made2017

Tom Cruise as a real-life pilot running guns and cocaine for the CIA — a lighter, funnier entry point into the same murky world of cartels, politics and complicity.

But Its jaunty tone undercuts the real horror of the subject in a way ZeroZeroZero never allows itself.

Cartel Land2015

ZeroZeroZero's Mexican strand dramatises a world this documentary walks straight into — same cartels, same landscape, same moral vertigo, minus the distance of a script.

Swap the fiction for the real thing: a documentary following an Arizona vigilante and a Mexican doctor-turned-militia-leader, both fighting cartels on their own terms, with a camera that got dangerously close.

But It's harrowing in a way scripted drama can dodge — real people, real stakes, no fictional safety net to soften it.

There Will Be Blood2007

Both are really about how a single valuable substance hollows out a family and a country from the inside — ZeroZeroZero keeps its crime-thriller clothes on, this one takes them off.

Swap cocaine for oil and Calabria for the American West and you've got the same engine: a commodity that turns family into liability and ambition into monstrousness, told at operatic length.

But There's no crime plot to hang onto — it's a character study of one man's corruption stretched across decades, with almost nothing that resembles a thriller.