David Simon on set of Treme
HBO is ironing out a deal to give Treme a first season pickup. The show comes from David Simon (creator of The Wire) and Eric Overmyer (producer/writer on various cop shows, including the fourth season of The Wire and Simon’s earlier show, Homicide: Life on the Street).
Treme follows a variety of people living in the Treme district of post-Katrina New Orleans as they reclaim their lives and the city rebuilds. Wendell Pierce (Det. ‘Bunk’ Moreland on The Wire) stars as a jazz musician with an ex-wife and new baby. Khandi Alexander (NewsRadio, Simon’s The Corner, CSI: Miami) plays the ex and a barkeeper. Melissa Leo (Frozen River) is a civil rights attorney. Steven Zahn (Rescue Dawn) portrays another musician. Clarke Peters (Det. Lester Freamon from The Wire) plays a Mardi Gras Indian chief. Rob Brown and Kim Dickens round out the main cast.
Variety has some choice quotes from Simon talking about how this won’t just be The Wire set in New Orleans and about the kinds of thematic matiral they’ll be tackling:
“We don’t intend to make ‘The Wire’ twice,” Simon said. “This is about people reconstituting their lives after their town was mostly, effectively destroyed… It’s not entirely a political show. We’re trying to be very intimate with people. And New Orleans is completely unique, there’s nothing in the world like it.”
Simon noted that there’s even perhaps the story of New Orleans can be used as a metaphor for the country’s current economic woes.
“Look at what happened down there after Katrina,” he said. “A lot of things in which New Orleans depended on and trusted turned out to be wholly undependable and untrustworthy. The governing institutions were supposed to monitor things of actual construct like the levees and the pumping stations. That could be an allegory for what we Americans presumed about our financial institutions, and the governing bodies that were supposed to monitor them.
“New Orleans found itself on its ass some years ago, and the rest of the country stared at it as it it was a unique case,” Simon said. “In some sense, Katrina is an outwire of what the rest of the country was going to experience.”
HBO had already ordered an additional nine scripts, but Variety says they’re still figuring out how many episodes the first season will contain. Production on the season is set to begin in the fall, after hurricane season dies down. That means no one should expect to see Treme until spring 2010 at the earliest. For a new David Simon show though, I expect the wait to be worth it.
