'El Chapo' TV Show Will Air During NYC Court Trial

NEW YORK, NY — Too bad the isolation chambers in Lower Manhattan's high-security Metropolitan Correctional Center don't have wi-fi. Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman, most prolific drug trafficker in history and a resident at the prison ever since his extradition from Mexico on Jan. 19, will miss his big Hollywood moment: Two, count 'em two, upcoming TV series exploring his life and times as Mexico's, and the world's, most-wanted man.

Univision announced Thursday that "El Chapo," a "boundary-breaking drama series" about the Sinaloa Cartel kingpin, will debut in April.

See also: El Chapo Takes New York: Everything You Need To Know

“This series pulls back the curtain on one of the most captivating criminals of our time by combining the world-class reporting and insights from Univision News’ investigative team with an outstanding team of talented storytellers and producers,” Camila Jiménez Villa, chief content officer of Fusion Media Group (owned by Univision), said in a press release.

“El Chapo” will be available for streaming on Netflix after it has aired on TV, according to Univision.

A second TV series on the drug kingpin is also in the works: A show on the History Channel called "#Cartel" (yes, with a hashtag). That show is being helmed by Chris Brancato — the same guy behind "Narcos," the Netflix binge favorite that followed the career of Pablo Escobar, a drug lord from Columbia known to have sold his product to El Chapo for distribution in the U.S.

(The History Channel show is still in development, and no debut date has been set, a spokesman said.)

And like so, the already insanely glorified tales of El Chapo's escapades in the 1980s, 1990s and 2000s will become the stuff of popular culture in 2017.

At a press conference last week announcing a 17-count court indictment against El Chapo, Robert Capers, U.S. Attorney for Brooklyn, warned the public not to put the kingpin on a pedestal.

"Guzman's story is not one of a do-gooder or a Robin Hood," Capers said. Instead, he said, "He's a man known for no other life but a life of crime, violence, death and destruction, and now he'll have to answer to that."

(At the same time, Capers and his law-enforcement cohorts have seemed to indulge a little in the drama and the public captivation. "Over the course of decades," the U.S. Attorney said in a speech fit for Netflix, "Guzman's destructive and murderous rise as an international narcotics trafficker is akin to that of a small cancerous tumor that metastasized and grew into a full-blown scourge that for decades littered the streets of Mexico with the casualties of violent drug wars over turf.")

Asked if the upcoming screen dramas on El Chapo might interfere with his court trial in Brooklyn, which court officials have said could take years, a spokesman for the U.S. Attorney replied: "The office declines to comment."

Lead photo via Day Donaldson/Flickr