Amy Muldoon reviews Treme, a new series about post-Katrina New Orleans by the creators of The Wire

NOT 15 minutes into the pilot of Treme--HBO's new drama about post-Katrina New Orleans--and a character complains, "I never thought I'd see even this much of it; this goddamn bridge. Gretna police standing there with their guns out, waitin' to make us walk the hell back. And here we are driving the other way like it didn't even happen."

Frontloading a reference to an incident like the Gretna Bridge is just the beginning of Treme's obvious sympathies. Treme (pronounced tre-MAY) wears the bitterness of New Orleans' population, its sorrow, confusion and only occasional joy on its sleeve with no pretense of being unbiased or politically objective.

Created by David Simon and Eric Overmyer--the team who wrote and produced HBO's The Wire--if the show's characters are occasionally dogmatic or self-righteous, the show itself never is. The facts simply speak for themselves.

Set simply "three months after," the loosely related ensemble cast represents the cultural fabric of New Orleans threatened with displacement following the storm...Returning to destroyed homes, missing family members, financial hardship and corrupt institutions, the drama of Treme is strikingly real. Unlike other popular television shows, the struggles faced by the characters are not self-involved or clichéd. There are no love triangles or trivial personal intrigues at center stage; there is plenty of real conflict in daily life that drives characters to change and evolve in interesting ways. Day by day, the fallout of the storm challenges the assumptions, aspirations and identities of the characters--often in a political manner.

http://socialistworker.org/2010/06/03/what-the-flood-couldnt-take