Don't expect 'The Wire' - this is New Orleans

‘Treme’, a solemn glimpse into the music and street culture of post-Katrina New Orleans from the creators of ‘The Wire’, promises to be a very different animal from that much-loved Baltimore show

EVEN THE NAME of HBO's new series is difficult. Treme. It's usually pronounced Tre-MAY and does not rhyme with Crème. But in New Orleans, there are all kinds of ways of saying it. It was originally French, with a double accent, close to Truh-MAY. In other parts of the city some say Tree-Mee, or a few old ladies say Tre-ME.

I'm having all of this explained to me by Lolis Eric Elie, a writer and consultant on the new series, which celebrates Treme, the "real" jazz neighbourhood of New Orleans, far from the tacky strip clubs and T-shirt merchants of Bourbon Street.

Treme, however you want to say it, is the latest work from The Wirecreator David Simon and Eric Overmyer, one of the writers on that Baltimore drama. Having started in the US last week it hopes to draw on an audience hungry for its predecessor's gritty urban realism. "I'm telling you now, you are not going to get The Wire: New Orleans," says Elie, who worked for many years as a New Orleans newspaper journalist and co-directed his own documentary about the Treme district.

“This new series has to be about the culture and the people of New Orleans after Katrina. That’s not guns and drugs in Baltimore,” says Elie.

While The Wirechronicles a post-industrial city mired by corruption and indifference, Tremeis about the redemption of a city that has fallen about as low as any American city could ever have.

Set three months after Hurricane Katrina, when dirty tide marks still dissect houses and stunned locals step over dried-up mud piles, the city as cesspool is not a metaphor but a daily hardship.

ELIE, WHO CARRIES an almost encyclopaedic knowledge of New Orleans history, was hired to bring a local perspective. “David Simon began as a journalist in Baltimore, and he is an excellent reporter, so he got New Orleans right away,” says Elie, “but there are some things you had to be here to experience. Like the silence after Katrina, for example. The families were gone, so there were no children. But there was hammering, construction workers opening houses, the sound of things starting again.” Another detail he brought to the script was that many New Orleans residents who didn’t know how to send text messages before Katrina had to learn it very quickly. The phone lines were jammed, and the only way to reach people was by text.

The text-message scenes evolved from questions put to him by Oscar-nominated actress Melissa Leo, who plays a resilient civil rights lawyer and wife to an angry college lecturer and struggling novelist, played by New Orleans native John Goodman.

The cast also includes Grammy-award winning singer-songwriter Steve Zahn, as a white, more-bohemian-than-thou DJ who despises gentrification and who opens up huge topics of class and race.

Like The Wire, we are tourists to the vast complexity of urban life, dropping in and out of scenes, confounding our need for a simple narrative.

In Baltimore, that scene-hopping made for some of the most gripping television ever created, but several critics fear that Treme's reverence for New Orleans music and post-Katrina recovery will kill the intensity.

“The effort to get New Orleans ‘right’ is at times so palpable it is off-putting, a self-consciousness that teeters on the edge of righteousness,” warns New York Times TV critic Alessandra Stanley of the show’s debut, which aired on US television last week.

That preachy earnestness is acutely felt when Steve Zahn’s character hears the city’s legendary Rebirth Brass Band on their first street parade since Katrina.

He rushes to his feet, explaining its significance to his partner with all the gravitas of a religious revelation.

He also refuses to play a jazz standard on his radio show and mocks the bourgeois white people who are gentrifying New Orleans. (As if he isn't.) Add in a musician who mockingly plays When the Saints Go Marching Into awe-inspired Midwestern aid workers, and you have accusations of New Orleans insider elitism.

BUT FOR ALL that, most critics can forgive the solemn tone for the show’s glimpse into New Orleans music and street culture.

“It’s what we’ve been waiting for,” says Keith Frazier, Rebirth’s founding member and bass drummer. “It’s helping to revitalise the whole scene in New Orleans, and it’s really how it is. People are already starting to investigate what’s really going on in New Orleans, getting away from Bourbon Street and hearing the real music.” He has a speaking part in the series, as do several members of the band.

"We even got to hang out with the cast and the crew of The Wire," says legendary jazz trumpeter Kermit Ruffins, who plays with his own band. "I flew to Baltimore to be with David Simon on the set of The Wire. Now his 14-year-old son is playing jazz piano. We're spreading out this music every day."

Ruffins, who had played the New Orleans music scene for decades, sees the show at the culmination of his career.

“This has been one of the happiest times of my life. I owe so much to this show. I feel like I’ve reached the finish line, that this show says all I need to say about the music scene in New Orleans.”

For film-maker James Demaria, who recently completed a documentary on New Orleans jazz, the first episode got it mostly right.

"It was pretty realistic but some parts were too neat and pretty," he says. " The Wireis a little more street, a little grittier, but this is a totally separate entity. If you love the music, you will love the series. This is about a city that has come to life. It's telling its own story."

The road to Treme: Simon's and Overmyer's CV

1991Baltimore Sun journalist David Simon completes a gritty account of the city's homicide squad, having spent a year recording them at work, in Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets.

1993-1999NBC broadcasts Homicide: Life on the Street, based on Simon's book. Simon writes an episode with Eric Overmyer, a playwright and TV scriptwriter.

1997Simon co-authors an acclaimed non-fiction book, The Corner, about life on the streets of west Baltimore

2002HBO begins broadcasting The Wire, based on Simon's writing. Crime novelist George Pelecanos later leaves to finish a book, and Eric Overmyer is hired as a writer. The show is a huge success.

2008Simon and long-term writing partner Ed Burns adapt journalist Evan Wright's book about the Iraq War into a HBO series, Generation Kill

2010Simon and Overmyer return with HBO series Treme, about New Orleans residents struggling to recover from Hurricane Katrina