The small screen offers plenty of post-Vietnam, pre-Sept. 11 nostalgia these days, but don’t expect a warm and fuzzy feeling from “Narcos,” an irresistible drama that began streaming Friday on Netflix. Expect instead a reminder of a time when a few lawless men did a lot of societal damage by spreading cocaine far and wide.

The series, fictionalized but grounded in real events, tells the story of Pablo Escobar and other drug traffickers in Colombia as they discovered, beginning in the 1970s, that a lot of money could be made by hooking people, especially wealthy Americans, on the drug. We see it unfold partly through the eyes of Steve Murphy, an agent for the Drug Enforcement Administration who is among those dispatched to Colombia from the United States to try to stem the tide.

Brazilian filmmaker José Padilha, who produced the series, has confessed that “Goodfellas” was a heavy influence, and like that film “Narcos” goes all-in on voice-over, especially early on. While the camera cuts between dramatized scenes and actual news footage from the era, we hear Murphy (Boyd Holbrook) describe what is taking place though we’ve barely met him at this point. That makes it a bit hard to warm to, but Holbrook’s droll delivery helps considerably. The technique also lets “Narcos” cover a lot of ground, Murphy’s exposition pushing the tale forward quickly when necessary.

By the midway point of this 10-episode series (a review of the second half will appear next week; the first five episodes are discussed herein), we’ve seen an illicit business boom, Colombia’s political and law-enforcement systems become corrupted by cocaine money, and America’s anti-drug and anti-communist campaigns become intertwined. It’s heady stuff, expertly served.

The series is the latest effort by Netflix to spread itself internationally, a strategy that brought us the bloated “Marco Polo” last year and the dreamy “Sense8” this spring. “Narcos” doesn’t mess around with atmospherics or cast-of-thousands nonsense. It’s built on sharp writing and equally sharp acting, as any good series needs to be. At the center of it is a prize-worthy performance by Brazilian actor Wagner Moura (who starred in Padilha’s “Elite Squad” films) as Escobar.

The further into the show you get, the more you realize that although the structure is classic good-guys-versus-bad-guys, the heart of the piece is its study of Escobar, portrayed as a man whose grandiose appetites aren’t satisfied by the incredible amounts of money his business brings in.

Add this doughy, nondescript fellow to the Bill Gates/Mark Zuckerberg/Etc. Club: Pass him on the street and you’d never suspect he was the brains behind a billion-dollar business. Moura, who can do a lot with a simple gaze into the distance, gives us a man who seems not to know what is driving him. Escobar professes a concern for the poor, makes a run at politics, tries to be a family man while having an affair with a reporter, all while ordering up assassinations and assorted other disruptions. He is a man whose inability to define himself appears, by the end of Episode 5, as if it’s likely to be his undoing, causing discord among his loyal lieutenants and the other kingpins in the Medellín cartel.

“I am not a rich person,” he tells a political operative at one point. “I am a poor person with money.” It’s a line that neatly sums up all of his many contradictions.

While we’re slowly unraveling the cipher who is Escobar, Murphy and his partner, Javier Peña (Pedro Pascal, who played Oberyn on “Game of Thrones”), are pursuing him. Murphy wryly explains early on how the money the cocaine business is bringing in begins to be a problem; Escobar’s sham taxi company is increasingly not up to the task of disguising all that income.

“On paper, Pablo had the most profitable taxi company ever,” Murphy says. “He only had three cars, but he was pulling in more than 5 million dollars a week.”

The series has its share of violence — as soon as a new character shows any sign of integrity or interest in combating the kingpins, you begin to fear for his life — but it also has an eye for the absurd. Murphy’s cat becomes pivotal in Episode 3, giving its life for the cause and leading to a ridiculous, and thoroughly believable, interrogation of a pair of airport employees suspected of leaking passport information to Escobar.

“The cat is under the jurisdiction of the American government,” Peña tells them, trying to scare them into talking. “And to kill it is the same as to kill a police dog.”

This colorful and ugly period has been mined by others and will continue to be. It’s not always clear where we are in time as the series rolls along, but by the midway point we’re moving into the 1990s, and American anti-drug efforts are in high gear. Hang on.