Just in time for the end of our run of The Wire, HBO has picked up Simon’s new series Treme to debut next spring. The series is about recovery in post-Katrina New Orleans, and stars Wendell Pierce (aka The Bunk!) as a jazz musician. Clarke Peters (Lester) is the other main Wire returnee.
And if you’ve not gotten enough of Simon on journalism this season, here’s a copy of his Congressional testimony from today.
i’m so excited about this new project! i’ve read about it online and it seems like it could be quite similar to The Wire, but just much smaller in scale (analyzing only one neighborhood, not an entire city). A lot of the elements are similar though: casting (I didn’t know Wendell Pierce is actually a New Orleans native!), production team (same “Simon + quasiexpert Burns/Overmyer” type of creative team), direction (Agnieszka Holland, who directed Moral Midgetry, and who is a genius), and sociological focus, it seems.
this Wire void in my life needs to be filled somehow.