HBO’s ‘Treme’ shows New Orleans keeping head above water
The Wire’s’ David Simon pushes play on the Big Easy
The rollicking title song for HBO’s new series “Treme,” premiering Sun., April 11 at 10 p.m., celebrates “jumpin’ and havin’ fun,” while the credits flash over walls spotted with stylized flood damage. Good times may not be the first thing you’d expect from a drama about New Orleans’ slow recovery from Hurricane Katrina.
Nor is “fun” exactly synonymous with the work of “Treme” co-creator David Simon. His TV masterpiece “The Wire” used a unifying plot about Baltimore police contending with drug lords for a vast meditation on the decline of civic institutions, from law enforcement to labor unions to the press, all as a mirror for our national decline.
Where “The Wire” showed a city in the midst of a slow-motion collapse, “Treme” finds post-Katrina New Orleans at the bottom, trying to get back up. While the new show shares “The Wire’s” expansive, unsparing vision of urban life, Simon and co-creator Eric Overmyer emphasize restoration and reunion with an angle that’s sunnier, if ever so slightly.
“Treme”
Sundays, 10 p.m. on HBO.
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(Photo by Paul Schiraldi)