ZEROZEROZERO

Neon, from Monday

What do you reckon is the most stressful part of trafficking a large shipment of drugs? Probably the constant fear of being arrested and spending the rest of your life in prison, right? That’s certainly one of the bad things that could happen to you but Neon’s new Italian drug drama, ZeroZeroZero, makes the case that it’s probably not the worst.

There’s always a chance you could be fed alive to pigs, for example. That happens to one guy near the start of the first episode, before any of the other tortures or several gunfight scenes. The series, which follows a fraught shipment of 5000kg of cocaine from Mexico to Italy, is effectively a study of all the different ways an international drug deal can go wrong, from the perspectives of three different parties involved.

The first we meet is an Italian crime syndicate led by stylish older gentleman Don Minu, who appears to live in an underground bunker on a goat farm. He’s the one who’s ordered all the cocaine, which is being packaged up by narco brothers Enrique and Jacinto Leyra and a team of women in their underwear out the back of a jalapeno canning factory in Mexico. The shipment of the 5000 cans of jalapenos is facilitated by New Orleans-based shipping magnate Edward Lynwood and his Succession-esque adult children.

All three parties are constantly under the pump — the producers certainly got their money’s worth out of Scottish band Mogwai, who provided the series’ tense, doomy soundtrack. Although the large volume of people involved in a cocaine shipment means there’s a lot to get your head around in the first episode, by the end it all starts falling into place. Who knew supply chain logistics could be so compelling?