Narco-Capitalist Macbeths in TV Series: Shakespeare's Archive in The Wire (David Simon, 2002–2008) and Breaking Bad (Vince Gilligan, 2008–2013)

Alicante Journal of English Studies, number 33, 2020, pages 00-00 Alicante Journal of English Studies, Issue 40, 2024, pages 179-198 Alicante Journal of English Studies / Revista Alicantina de Estudios Ingleses ISSN: 0214-4808 | e-ISSN: 2171-861X Issue No. 40, 2024, pages 179-198 https://doi.org/10.14198/raei.2024.40.10 Narco-Capitalist Macbeths in TV Series: Shakespeare’s Archive in The Wire (David Simon, 2002–2008) and Breaking Bad (Vince Gilligan, 2008–2013) Victor Huertas Author: Victor Huertas Universitat de València, Spain https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3154-9245 [email protected] Date of reception: 03/07/2023 Date of acceptance: 21/12/2023 Citation: Huertas, Victor. 2024. “Narco-Capitalist Macbeths in TV Series: Shakespeare’s Archive in The Wire (David Simon, 2002–2008) and Breaking Bad (Vince Gilligan, 2008–2013).” Alicante Journal of English Studies 40: 179-198. https://doi.org/10.14198/raei.2024.40.10 © 2024 Victor Huertas Licence: This work is shared under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0): https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/ I will tackle serial appropriations of Shakespeare’s Macbeth in The Wire (David Simon, 2002–2008) and Breaking Bad (Vince Gilligan, 2008–2013). Both complex TV series recast Macbeth in the context of narcocapitalism. Rather than constituting an alternative to mainstream capitalism, narco-capitalism maintains the American and global socioeconomic orders as depicted in both series. Paying attention to what will be defined as Shakespeare’s archive, it will be shown that traces from Macbeth are reactivated in The Wire and Breaking Bad. Shakespeare’s archive is formed by traces of Shakespeare’s dramatic and narrative sources, quartos, folios, later editions and adaptations. This corpus displays verbal and non-verbal features of Shakespeare’s oeuvre. Taken together, traces and reenactments of Shakespeare highlight the multifarious and competing ways in which Shakespearean appropriations sail through the depth and length of complex TV. To illustrate this, I will use archive theory, transmedia theory and narcocapitalism as lenses of analysis. This framework helps explain archival strategies employed for Shakespearean appropriation within the social context of both series. The results reveal that Shakespeare’s archive in both works leads to an ambivalent ethical assessment of the potentialities of narco-capitalism. Keywords: narco-capitalism; archive; transmedia; Macbeth; reenactment; trace; sources; source text; adaptation Victor Huertas 180 Alicante Journal of English Studies, Issue 40, 2024, pages 179-198 1. Introduction This article tackles the interplays between Shakespeare’s Macbeth and two complex TV series: The Wire, written by David Simon–first aired on HBO June 2, 2002, last aired on March 9, 2008–, and Breaking Bad, written by Vince Gilligan– first aired on AMC March 20, 2008, last aired on September 29, 2013. While these series are not the first screen works that recast Macbeth in the war on drugs, I argue that they use Shakespeare’s archive as a lens to explore narcocapitalism. Shakespeare’s archive is formed by Shakespeare’s authoritative texts, their narrative and dramatic sources, afterlives, adaptations, performances and all documents connected to Shakespeare’s ouvre. Shakespeare’s archive is used to explain Shakespearean critical and performance edition histories. It is also evolving as intermedial reenactment of past performances. My understanding of Shakespeare’s archive combines these two models. Meanwhile, narco-capitalism is not represented here as counter to mainstream capitalism but as a part of the US’s socioeconomic order, founded upon–and funded by–the drug business. Shakespeare’s oeuvre adds dramatic density to serial dramaturgies. Appreciation of these two series’ interconnections with Macbeth increases if Shakespeare’s authoritative text is not regarded as the only nor as the main point of reference for comparative analysis. As suggested, Shakespeare in these and other series is not just an authoritative corpus but a set of “traces”–i.e. “linguistic, cultural or thematic residues” (Iyengar, 2023, 184)–and “reenactments”–i.e. a “revised, revisited, reconceived, reconstituted” performance of the plays, “a discursive and performative space and condition of awareness […] of the performances” (Cartelli 2019, 11, 13)–. Shakespeare’s archive agglutinates parts and sums of texts and performance histories, either for their collection or for their reactivation. Therefore, it provides an angle to combine logics of trace and reenactment that allows us to discern patterns of appropriation in series. Shakespearean scholars interested in The Wire have centered on its indebtedness to Shakespeare’s histories (Bronfen 2020; Pittman 2020). However, Roger Downey described Stringer Bell as someone who, “doggedly pursuing his version of the American Dream to its bitter end, [was a] brother beneath the skin to Macbeth” (2007, n.p.). Tom French regarded Bell as the series’ equivalent to the Scottish warrior (2012, n.p.). The character’s name, “Bell,” replicates that of the object used in Macbeth to summon the Scottish thane for “regicidal action” (Kinney, 2006, 81). Analyzing D’Angelo Barksdale’s explanation of the rules of chess, Elisabeth Bronfen affirms that “[t]he moves that individual players can make are highly codified and ritually predetermined, based on a shared memory of what schemes are possible” (2020, 61). Such rules explain Shakespeare’s grafting onto The Wire by suggesting an archive of mechanisms of transmedia storytelling 181 Narco-Capitalist Macbeths in TV Series: Shakespeare’s Archive in The Wire... Alicante Journal of English Studies, Issue 40, 2024, pages 179-198 that evoke theatrical memories. When D’Angelo reveals the Queen–i.e. Stringer Bell–as the player with the greatest flexibility for moving across the chessboard, Avon Barksdale’s right-hand man is suggested as his usurper. From season one to three we follow Bell taking his friend and rival Barksdale’s seat as kingpin on West Baltimore. This move towards usurpation narratively expands what happens in Shakespeare’s Macbeth, similarly, over the course of almost three acts. The elusiveness of the connection of Shakespeare’s authoritative texts with these series encourages viewers to look for performative interplays between them. D’Angelo’s toying with the chess pieces suggests a microcosm that transposes the limited stock of moves allowed to characters who know themselves to be actors in a stage to the TV screen. Pawns and Queens are actor-characters who, in this small-scale play–a sort of Table Top Shakespeare–, may, like Macbeth, aspire to replace the piece which stands as monarch. However, The Wire’s interconnections with Macbeth also find explicit home in the play’s screen history. Near the end of season one, Omar Little, Bell’s Nemesis, returns to the streets of Baltimore to stir up future strife with Barksdale. This arrival playfully mimics the manner in which Macbeth often ends on screen: an usurper arrives in Scotland to threaten the recently crowned Malcom. More explicitly than The Wire, Breaking Bad employed Macbeth as a guidebook for fans. Paul Cantor (2019) and Jeffrey Chisum (2019) pointed out the transpositions of the conventions of Shakespeare’s tragedy to the narrative structure and generic context of Gilligan’s series. More intensely than in The Wire, Breaking Bad used Macbeth’s katabatic sources. In “Crawl Space,” Walter White, who has by this time amassed a fortune by selling his own brand of 99.1% pure meta-amphetamines, goes into his basement to put together $500,000 to pay for relocating his family to escape Gustavo Fring. Finding out that his wife Skyler has given part of the money to her lover, Walter laughs maniacally and lies crying on the floor of the basement. Anguish and laughter, mixing the tragic with the grotesque, renders this space theatrical. The combination brings Breaking Bad close to the Shakespearean stage, in which a trap door symbolically intercommunicated the earth and the Avernus. The Whites’ basement dovetails TV drama’s domesticity, reenactments of Shakespearean playacting and, by implication, traces of the Medieval plays which reproduced hell as a physical space that were sources to Macbeth. In Shakespeare, Macbeth descends to a non-defined space to find out from the Witches what the future has in store. Oftentimes, the world of Shakespeare’s Macbeth is shown on screen as one in which the lines between earth and hell are porous. Shakespeare’s archive in The Wire and Breaking Bad dramatically explores the narco-capitalist zeitgeist of the two series. In the pages that follow, I will define archive as a lens to explore Shakespearean traces in both works. I will support Victor Huertas 182 Alicante Journal of English Studies, Issue 40, 2024, pages 179-198 this concept semiotically with terminology from transmedia theory. I will define narco-capitalism as a context wherein Shakespeare’s archive may be understood in The Wire and Breaking Bad. Finally, I will explore archival reactivations of Shakespeare’s sources, source text and adaptations of Macbeth in The Wire and in Breaking Bad. 2. Archive, transmedia and narco-capitalism Research on Shakespeare’s archive has focused on its uses for printed and digital editions (Galey 2014) and performance (Hodgdon 2016; Gutneratne 2016; Buchanan 2020). The fragmentary logic of the archive helps understand the increase of “fleeting citations of Shakespeare or [that] draw intermittently on character types and narratives from the plays” on TV (Greenhalgh, 2022, 257). These have contributed to disseminate the view that Shakespeare’s playwriting was a template for contemporary screen fiction (Balló and Pérez, 2015, 12). But due to complex TV’s “subtle and debatable” relationship with Shakespeare (Wald, 2020, 2), Shakespeare’s works often resurface in series as “cross-mappings” (Bronfen 2020), as “slingshots” (Wilson 2021), or as “returns” (Wald 2020), i.e. as traces. A Shakespearean deposit is suggested to be underneath serial substrata. In fact, fandom practices such as “drilling” (Mittell [2009] 2015, 289) are recurrent strategies used to appeal to viewers. Following Sarah Clarke Stuart, literary works “help to expand the meaning of the show, which is sometimes a great relief when meaning within the text seems a little thin” (2011: 3). Michael Foucault describes discursive traces which, all collected, are arranged serially.1 The philosopher privileges documents rather than narratives, and advocates for the identification of “series” of documents, which are “juxtaposed to one another, [following] one another, overlap[ping] and intersect[ing]” each other, irreducible as they are, “to a linear schema” ([1969] 2002: 9). We should, he suggests, identify “discursive events,” which allows us to discern principles regulating relations between the afore-mentioned series (Ibid: 30). This does not mean tracing past discursive events in a restorative fashion, but to discover which modes of existence characterize such statements “independently of their enunciation […], in which they [were] reactivated, and used” (Ibid: 139). The archive is not merely cumulative, but productive. 1 Uses of Foucault’s theory for the purposes of extracting Shakespearean remains in series is precedented in Víctor Huertas-Martín, 2022, “Hamlet Goes Legit: Archaeology, Archive and Transformative Adaptation in Sons of Anarchy (FX 2008–2014),” International Journal of English Studies, 22(1), 41–61. 183 Narco-Capitalist Macbeths in TV Series: Shakespeare’s Archive in The Wire... Alicante Journal of English Studies, Issue 40, 2024, pages 179-198 Foucault’s archive interrelates well with transmedia theory, which helps explain serial Shakespeares. Lars Elleström describes transmedia storytelling as “narratives in different media types working together to form a larger whole” (2019, 6). As the previous theatrical examples show, this means that “media characteristics” are recognizable in other media (Ibid.). Integrating narratives in communicative processes means that verbal language is not the only means of communication (Ibid., 11). Narratives do not autonomously exist except as communicative processes through media products between communicative minds (Ibid., 21–22). Parallels between Foucault’s and Elleström’s ideas are easy to discern by establishing equivalences between “mediation” and “representation” and the above-defined “trace” and “reenactment.” “Mediation” is, following Elleström, the “display of sensory configurations that are perceived by human sense receptors.” Such configurations are “presemiotic” and understood as “the physical realization of entities (with material, sensorial, and spatiotemporal qualities, and semiotic potential)” (Ibid., 23). The latter, “representation,” is a “semiotic phenomenon,” understood “as the heart of signification” when “a human agent makes sense of the mediated sensory configurations, [and] sign functions are activated and representation is at work” (23). Mediations share with traces their residual features. Shakespeare exists in series as traces, remains or mediations, not always explicitly expressed as Shakespearean. Reenactments are activated sign functions that the perceiver may more easily identify as Shakespearean. These two poles signification are neither mutually exclusive nor absolute. Shakespeare’s archive in these series develops within the context of narcocapitalism. Following Laurence de Sutter, narco-capitalism designates a psychopolitical system sustained by the production of stimulants. Gaining strength beyond World War Two, narco-capitalism made progress as governments legalized and marketed addictive products. The politics of excitement which drives consumption confirm, as De Sutter suggests, the fact that contemporary modernity is “unimaginable without drugs” (2018: 45). He argues that the survival of banks during the subprime crisis of 2008 was possible only thanks to narco-capitalism. While traditional investors withdrew cash from banks, drug dealers pumped “liquidity into the system–which they needed to give their cash a legal appearance” (46). In the US post-industrial context, as Jamie J. Fader shows, whenever drug workers managed to keep “a foothold in the legal and illegal economies” (2019: 66), their quality of life increased due to the reduced risks of detection, the increase in clientele and the possibility of justifying increasing sums of money. Such is “the game” in which contemporary global TV series have been setting their dramaturgies–see Narcos (José Padilha, Chris Brancato, Eric Newman, 2015-2017), El Chapo (Daniel Posada, 2017–2018), Hache (Verónica Victor Huertas 184 Alicante Journal of English Studies, Issue 40, 2024, pages 179-198 Fernández, 2019), El Immortal (José Manuel Lorenzo, Rafa Montesinos, David Ulloa, 2022), etc.–, many of them inspired in The Wire and Breaking Bad. Cocaine exists, as De Sutter says, “in an economic system appropriate to its volatility, its illegality, its addictiveness […] an abstract nervous system that has become the perfect excitation” (50). This excitation is explained in terms of “efficiency.” Such efficiency consists of consuming narcotics for the sole purpose of continuing to consume narcotics, an activity by way of which, arguably, the greyness of everyday life is subverted. For De Sutter, grey moments take place at times “with high levels of nervousness, within which accidents occur suggesting that things could be different” (94). This excitation enables the subject to cross material and conceptual borders which otherwise cannot be crossed. But these crossings produce increases of energy accompanied by the risk of losing control (104). Crossing borders defines the journeys of the likes of Stringer Bell or Walter White as Macbeth analogues. Likewise, it defines the spontaneous moves that subaltern characters in The Wire and Breaking Bad often individually or collectively make. 3. Reactivating Macbeth in The Wire According to Monique L. Pittman, Shakespeare and David Simon bring into play “the shards” of unofficial history to disrupt “the uniformity of a narrated past” (379). This is achieved, she continues, by telling an alternative American history centered on the urban classes (Ibid.). Honing in on Baltimore’s institutional corruption, apathy and sclerosis, Simon used his previous work, Homicide: A Year on the Streets of Baltimore (1991), as the basis for The Wire. Similarly, when writing Macbeth, Shakespeare handled historical material while keeping an eye on the political situation of his own time. It has been argued that to write Macbeth Shakespeare conflated chronicle sources to pay homage to the Scottish King James. For Geoffrey Bullough, “the play could be truly said to present a composite picture of the darkest side of Scottish medieval history as viewed from the happy present in James’s benign reign of unity and concord” (1973, 448). Though Shakespeare’s departures from Raphael Holinshed’s Chronicles of England, Scotlande, and Ireland (1587), Hector Boece’s Historia Gentis Scotorum (1527) and George Buchanan’s Rerum Scoticarum Historia (1582) support this view, the complexity of the play’s sources–including witch trial reports, the official account of the Gowrie Conspiracy, official discourses on the Gunpowder Plot–challenge one-dimensional readings of Macbeth as Stuart propaganda. Simon, as Shakespeare before him, conflated documents that the creatives gathered for their scripts. It is tempting to think that Simon’s sententiae, from his eye-witnessing of court cases, mediate lines from Macbeth. His conclusions, summarized as ten rules, shed light on the machinery of Baltimore’s legal 185 Narco-Capitalist Macbeths in TV Series: Shakespeare’s Archive in The Wire... Alicante Journal of English Studies, Issue 40, 2024, pages 179-198 system. Rule number one read: “A good man is hard to find, but twelve of them, gathered together in one place, is a miracle” (1,164). This skepticism on human morals might be described as a mediation of Young Macduff’s words, for whom “there are liars and swearers enough to beat the honest men and hang up them” (4.3.55-57). Rule number two–“The victim is killed once, but a crime scene can be murdered a thousand times” (145)–resembles detective Bunk’s address to a corpse: “Don’t think about coming back a murder. Don’t even think” (1, 2). In translating this sententia to the TV screen, Bunk’s words might mediate Macbeth’s address to Banquo’s Ghost–“never shake / Thy gory locks at me” (3.4.57)–, indicating a human desire to not confront the haunting ghost of a victim. Bunk’s directive comprises the terror produced by the Ghost in Shakespeare’s text, and represents and reenacts Shakespearean performance memories. Elusive as Shakespearean references seem, the series’ pathos is intensified through them. Nightmare and war images turn Baltimore’s streets into a sinister landscape. As Bubs asserts, there is a “thin line ‘tween heaven and here” (“Old Cases”). Challenges–“You’re gonna see me in your sleep” (“Duck and Cover”), “Y’all can tell Barksdale and them know who owns these towers” (“The Detail”)–echo Scotland’s intermediate state between a heavenly and a hellish space, how terrifying it is when ghosts visit Macbeth while he sleeps or his boasts when faced with the Anglo-Scottish approaching army. Cinematic mediations replace traditional TV naturalism with spine-chilling spectacle when The Towers’ neighbors drop objects on Prezswelezsky’s car (“The Detail”), a scene that approximates the frightening arrival of trees to Dunsinane. Inanimate objects, anonymously handled by animate beings, advance against an oppressor which they judge to be tyrannical. Cockeyed youngsters and ghost-like mangled warriors step, as Bubs puts it, “on dead soldiers” (“The Buys”). A theatrical enthusiasm drives those who enter this war zone. This qualifies the likes of Bubs to dismiss Sergeant Sydnor’s inability to pass as one of Baltimore’s “soldiers.” The appropriateness of clothes, an issue also tackled in Macbeth, points in The Wire at characters’ suitability for specific roles and at the mechanisms by which individuals put on the robes of others in cycles of emulation. By accepting to wear D’Angelo’s clothes–as Macbeth accepts “borrowed robes” (1.3.110)–, Bell accepts to replace him as Donette’s partner. Prophecy suggests routes to predict future breaches in loyalty. Brianna’s declaration of loyalty to D’Angelo–“As long as those Towers stand to, I am Dee’s mother” (“Stray Rounds”)–predicts the collapse of The Towers and D’Angelo’s downfall. This prediction is strengthened by association with the Third Apparition’s prediction–“Macbeth shall never vanquished be, until / Great Birnam Wood to high Dunsinane Hill / Shall come against him” (4.1.91-93)–. The association of these two conditionals help viewers perceive mediations from Macbeth. As we guess, those Towers will not stand. Victor Huertas 186 Alicante Journal of English Studies, Issue 40, 2024, pages 179-198 For Paul Dean, Macbeth’s imagery points “to an underlying pattern, an order waiting to emerge […] at once fragmented and discontinuous, and lucidly controlled” (1999, 220). Simon’s series achieves this effect as reactivations of Macbeth grow more visible. This increases with selections and alterations on traces of Macbeth’s chronicles and adaptations. Wallace’s exile from and return to Baltimore exemplifies this. As William C. Carroll says, in film and theatre productions of Macbeth, “in his return Fleance represents the revenging son of a murdered father, a Hamlet–or, rather, a Fortinbras–figure who has somehow entered the wrong play” (2013, 274). Wallace’s return to “The Pits” is untimely since his persecutor Stringer Bell still rules, contrary to what occurs in Macbeth. Fleance’s return, as told in Holinshed, is not part of Shakespeare’s Macbeth. Chronicles–in which Fleance is killed by the King of Wales–and the archive of Fleance’s stage returns reconnect Shakespeare’s play with his sources and expands on Shakespeare’s performance practice. Meanwhile, Bell’s engaging in developing mirrors Macbeth’s eagerness to build up Dunsinane Castle, a venture narrated in Holinshed and Buchanan. While, for Russell M. Hiller, the building episode in Chronicles accentuates Macbeth’s growing despotism and greed, Buchanan “underscores that the fortress symbolizes [Macbeth’s] growing isolation, vulnerability, and despair” (2021, 107). Rather than conflating sources, as Shakespeare did, The Wire stresses something akin to Buchanan’s view as Bell’s alienation increases while his developing delusion grows. Despite Macbeth’s actions, spectators and readers continue to be sympathetic towards the character’s suffering. This may be explained by Macbeth’s capacity to split himself into two characters: an actor and a character inside a story. Macbeth “simultaneously [stages] the fictional character and the existentially present performer, and [undermines] illusion in order to heighten the affective response of the audience” (Fox, 2013, 208). This duplicity in Macbeth seems evident, as Fox’s essay shows, in Macbeth’s “Tomorrow” soliloquy. In The Wire, during one of their confrontations, Lester Freamon, believing that Jimmy McNulty’s motives for his dedication to work are self-serving, diagnoses his “sick” colleague: “A life, Jimmy, you know what that is? It’s the shit that happens when you’re waiting for the things that never come” (“Slapstick”). Freamon’s words attempt to calm down the narco-capitalist excitement of the workaholic and unstable McNulty and mediate Macbeth’s realization of the futility of creeping “in [a] petty pace from day to day / To the last syllable of recorded time” (5.5.19-20). This pharmakon proves more effective with drug dealers who get to acquire a Macbethlike distant, quiet, view of themselves. As Dennis Cutty Wise says in an interview with a priest, “I’ve just had this feelin’ for a long time and it’s like I’m standing outside myself, watching me do things I don’t wanna do, you know? Jus’ seein’ me like I’m somebody else but never ever being able to stop the show. I’m tired” 187 Narco-Capitalist Macbeths in TV Series: Shakespeare’s Archive in The Wire... Alicante Journal of English Studies, Issue 40, 2024, pages 179-198 (“Back Burners”). Unlike Macbeth, Dennis chooses to end the performance by leaving “the game.” While confessing, D’Angelo’s dramatic reenactment of his intervention in the killing of Deidre is punctuated by his memory of the tapping sounds against the victim’s window, a representation of the knocking on hell’s gate invoked by the Porter in Macbeth. On receiving congratulations for his confession, seeing Rhonda Pearlman’s reaction to the photos of Dreirde’s corpse, he sympathetically realizes this brutality’s impact on the attorney. This permits him to summarize his history: “Y’all don’t understand, man. You don’t get it. I grew up in this shit […] It’s just what we do. You just live with this shit until you can’t breathe no more. I swear to God, I was courtside for eight months and I was freer in jail than I was at home” (“Sentencing”; italics added). Echoing Macbeth’s sleepless suffering–“Sleep no more” (2.2.36), “Sleep no more” (2.2.42; emphases mine), “’Glamis hath murdered sleep, and therefore Cawdor / Shall sleep no more. Macbeth shall sleep no more” (2.2.43-44; italics added)–and Macbeth’s anticipation of his certain downfall–“… struts and frets his hour upon the stage, / And then is heard no more” (5.5.24-25; emphasis mine), D’Angelo’s words mediate Shakespeare’s repetitions. By asking to “start over […] to go somewhere where [he] can breathe like regular folk” (“Sentencing”), D’Angelo mediates Macbeth’s exposed desires to “… wash [that] blood / Clean from [his] hand” (2.2.61-62)–. The Wire evokes Macbeth’s archive by reenacting meditative journeys present in an American Shakespearean legacy developed in recent popular adaptations (see Albanese 2010). Such adaptations often present convicts who, as films like Shakespeare Behind Bars (Dir. Hank Rogerson, 2006) show, find through Shakespeare the way to unleash and alleviate what De Sutter describes as the “irritability and […] irrationality” that was born of the urbanization that accompanied the development of western capitalism (99). Macbeth’s archive in The Wire capitalizes on oscillations within politics of excitement. Rather than turning them into a politics of anesthetization–described by De Sutter as forms to control politics of excitement (19–20)–, they are turned into an emancipatory subjectivity. Nonetheless, the year The Wire ended, AMC started another serial Macbeth that pushed narco-capitalist politics of excitement to the limit. 4. Reactivating Macbeth in Breaking Bad Following Van Der Werff, the Shakespearean skeleton of Breaking Bad permitted writers not to worry “about the big picture to sweat the small stuff” and enjoy “some of the most memorable TV moments ever” (2018). The afterlives of Breaking Bad, including Netflix’s El Camino: A Breaking Bad Movie (dir. Vince Gilligan, 2020) and media adaptations including memes, Greg Mandel’s faux Elizabethan poem Macmeth: The Most Excellent Dark Comedie and Tragical Victor Huertas 194 Alicante Journal of English Studies, Issue 40, 2024, pages 179-198 they raise (2011, 15). This male-centered emphasis in complex series preceding #MeToo explain explains the predominance of traces of Shakespeare’s tragedies and histories during the first decade of TV seriality, with examples such as The Wire (2002-2008), Deadwood (2004-2006), Rome (2005-2007), Sons of Anarchy (Kurt Sutter, 2008-2013), etc. Before Shakespeare-laden daring and shrewd characters like Gemma Teller, Cersei Lannister, Claire Underwood, Shioban or Kate Ashby came to share the complex TV screens with difficult men, Serial Shakespeares were a playground for the stamina, ambition and non-tractability of the likes of Stringer Bell, Jimmy McNulty, Lucius Vorenus, Walter White, Seth Bullock, Al Swearengern, Jax Teller, all of them, as Concepción Cascajosa-Virino says, being middle-aged men in crisis ( 2016, 172).3 The choice of play accommodates the impetus of male protagonists, ready, as Shakespeare’s Macbeth, to tread bloody paths to move beyond the very realms of the real. But TV’s traditional feminine ethos encourages revisions of gender politics in the appropriated plays. Thus, women like Skyler White manage to outmaneuver violent male control and have a fresh start. The Wire and Breaking Bad examine possibilities for Shakespeare to be restorative, and, surprisingly, he often is so amidst hyperreal havoc, ruled by the politics of excitement of narco-capitalism, that goes hand in hand with what, at heart, still is TV family melodrama and police procedural. Acknowledgements This article is one of the outputs of the Research Project "CIRCE: Early Modern European Theater on Screen" (CIGE/2021/086), financed by Conserlleria d'Innovació, Universitats i Ocupació of the Generalitat Valenciana. It was written during a research stay at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid (April–June 2022). Acknowledgements are owed to Arturo Mora-Rioja, Reto Winckler and Ben Alexander for their feedback on the manuscript Additionally, this publication is inscribed within Research Project "Archivos en transición: Memorias colectivas y usos subalternos" (programa MSCA-RISE de la Unión Europea, acciones Marie Skłodowska-Curie, ref. 872299). Works Cited AlbAnese, Denise. 2010. Extramural Shakespeare. New York, Palgrave Macmillan. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230112940. 3 See Brett Marin, Difficult Men: Behind the Scenes of a Creative Revolution: From The Sopranos and The Wire to Mad Men and Breaking Bad, Penguin Books, 2014. 195 Narco-Capitalist Macbeths in TV Series: Shakespeare’s Archive in The Wire... Alicante Journal of English Studies, Issue 40, 2024, pages 179-198 bAlló, Jordi and Xavier Pérez. 2015. El mundo, un escenario (Shakespeare: el guionista invisible). Translated by Carlos Losilla. Barcelona: Editorial Anagrama S.A. bronfen, Elisabeth. 2020. 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