R. Reese Fuller

HBO picks up Treme

by R. Reese Fuller

There will be a new TV series about life in post-Katrina New Orleans, but this time it won't come from the folks at Fox, but rather from HBO. According to Variety, David Simon' s pilot for Treme has the greenlight .
"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 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."

The series will begin shooting this fall with a spring debut. In addtion to the pilot, nine scripts have been added to the series. Check out some of Gambit's recent coverage of the pilot as it was shot in New Orleans, including this cover story and interviews with David Simon and Wendel Pierce.