Univision has struck a deal to air Narcos, the popular Netflix original series about drug lord Pablo Escobar, on Univision Network leading up to the series's second-season launch on the streaming service later this year.
Univision-owned UniMás will air the first season of another Netflix original series, the the Spanish-language comedic drama Club de Cuervos, about a family-owned soccer team, ahead of its upcoming second season on Netflix.
Financial terms and air dates were not released. Separately, Netflix and the Univision Story House development and production unit said they will co-produce a drama series, El Chapo, about that other famed narcotics criminal. The drama will be available to Netflix members in the U.S. after it aits on UniMás in 2017. In the rest of the world, episodes of El Chapo will premiere exclusively on Netflix.
Univision and Netflix said the arrangement would give millions of U.S. Hispanic viewers who don't subscribe to Netflix the chance to sample Narcos and Club de Cuervos and to promote the shows' returns to Netflix.
Here are descriptions from the programmers of these series:
Narcos chronicles the gripping real-life stories of the drug kingpins of the late 1980s and the corroborative efforts of law enforcement to meet them head on in brutal, bloody conflict. It details the conflicting forces – legal, political, police, military and civilian – that clash in an effort to control the world’s most powerful commodity: cocaine. The series re-partners creator and executive producer José Padilha (Elite Squad, RoboCop) with acclaimed Brazilian actor Wagner Moura (Elite Squad, Elysium), who earned a Golden Globe nomination for his portrayal of a captivating Pablo Escobar alongside Boyd Holbrook (Gone Girl) and Pedro Pascal (Game of Thrones) as real-life DEA agents Steve Murphy and Javier Peña. Narcos is produced by Gaumont Television for Netflix.
Club de Cuervos, which debuted in all Netflix territories last August, is an outrageous original Spanish-language series from Mexican filmmaker Gaz Alazraki (Nosotros los Nobles). Balanced equally among comedy and drama, Club de Cuervos brings viewers into the middle of a no-holds-barred battle between members of a wealthy family to determine who will gain control of the beloved professional soccer team, The Cuervos of Nuevo Toledo. The series stars Luis Gerardo Mendez and Mariana Treviño, and features Stephanie Cayo, Daniel Giménez Cacho, Ianis Guerrero and Antonio de la Vega.
