S1E1 Lady Comes to Town

Griselda's premiere aired January 25, 2024 on Netflix and drew 38 million views in its first four days - the platform's most-watched premiere of the year at that point. The episode established Griselda Blanco as already competent and dangerous before Miami ever saw her, which was the show's most important structural decision: the premiere did not trace the development of her power but showed her arriving with it and deploying it against an environment that systematically underestimated her because of her gender. Sophia Vergara's physical and vocal transformation from her Modern Family persona was evident from the premiere's opening minutes and was cited across reviews as the episode's most formally significant achievement - a performance calibrated to make the character legible as someone genuinely dangerous rather than as a star turn. The 79 percent Rotten Tomatoes critical score from 53 critics on the series reflected a consensus that the premiere's quality was real but that the season's overall execution did not uniformly sustain it.