“Still rolling,” a director’s assistant hollers as he peers into a home office. The cast and crew of streaming series Surviving The Cartel hold their breath as actor Ryon Thomas assumes his role as cunning politician Taylor Grant.
Over the last few weeks, AMC Network’s second season of Surviving The Cartel transformed Dallas-Fort Worth into the setting of a psychological cartel drama. Filming sites include Knox Henderson’s PM Lounge, locations in Fort Worth, a Conroe Street single residence and the sprawling Lucas home.
Inside the home, New York actress Liana April and Bedford actor Douglas Cunningham transform into the second season’s Justice and Jessica Bradley, a father-daughter duo who are part of the most powerful and richest African American family, the largest American distributor of OxyContin.
“It's easy to point fingers, but when you go deep, a lot of rich guys in this country are in that gray area,” show creator Ely Bams says. “They have the same kind of morality as those people [in the cartel], but they do it the legal way.”
Surviving the Cartel was created, directed and produced by Bams under 1265 Films, a Dallas-based independent entertainment company he founded in 2012 that specializes in “film distribution and the film and television production of scripts that are rejected by Hollywood.” Surviving the Cartel fit the mold.
The show originated from Bams’s travels to Mexico, where he studied the cartel’s decision-making without judgment.
The series explores the concept of emulation through Sinaloa kingpin Alejandro “The Pope” Cordona, played by Venezuelan actor Gabriel Agüero, whose past roles include the 2022 thriller Jezabel and the 2019 drama The Dance. Robbed of his Silicon Valley CEO position, Cordona succeeds his father as the head of the Sinaloa cartel.
Surviving the Cartel is an interconnected survival story, weaving together the Cordonas' story with a Mexican farmer played by Rey Cantu and a grief-ridden El Paso detective played by Dennis O’Neill. It's the untold stories of those who have no choice.
“A simple signature of Bill Clinton and the Canadian Prime Minister and Mexico with the NAFTA deal changed and broke thousands of families,” Bams says.
The North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) between the U.S., Canada and Mexico went into effect in 1994, eliminating tariffs on goods and creating a North American free-trade zone. It was replaced by the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement on July 1, 2020.
Cantu, who was undergoing chemo during the first season’s filming, portrays Carlos Ortega, a sailor-turned-farmer unwilling to compromise his morals, put out of business by NAFTA and unable to pay cartel-demanded piso, a fee local businesses are forced to pay to the cartel. It’s a typical case for a Mexican farmer, Bams says.
The fictional crime drama also explores the femicide that occurred because of maquiladoras, foreign-owned factories in Mexico that benefit from low labor costs as a result of NAFTA.
Just Say No
“Nobody talked about it,” Bams says.He would, but Hollywood wasn't ready. Bams shopped the earliest concept of the series around Hollywood in 2015, only for his Los Angeles manager to coldly condemn him.
“She wrote me a very mean email saying that you have an accent, you should just quit, you'll never make it, stuff like that,” Bams says. “It was a very mean email, and I told her, ‘OK, I don’t want to work with you anymore; I want to do things myself,’ and I raised the money and did the show. The rest is history.”
Bams, who was born in the Democratic Republic of Congo, began independently working on Surviving the Cartel in 2017. The series premiered March 2022 in Mexico City with support of his brother and investors. Cantu wouldn’t make it due to cancer complications. The actor, who was a father figure to Bams and is credited as a producer, died on Aug. 29, 2024, on the heels of the show’s big break.
AMC Networks International Latin America and AMC Southern Europe acquired Surviving the Cartel in September 2023 with a five-season commitment. Bams knew he had something special, he says. Now, Hollywood knows too.
“Cut for lunch,” yells assistant director Kais Marz. Hungry actors and crew members scurry away for the last day of local filming. Next, the team will fly to Mexico. After, they’ll wrap up in McAllen.
“The drug business is a beast,” Bams says. “It’s that spray that nobody can control. Everybody is surviving it, even the people inside the cartel.”
Surviving the Cartel Season 2 premieres July 31 on Amazon Prime. AMC Networks will air the season in South America, Central America, Mexico, the Caribbean, Spain, Portugal and Portuguese-speaking African countries.
