David Simon: Tremé's Filmmaker

Tremé's Filmmaker

David Simon didn't create New Orleans. But he might have created the best television show about it. Treme, which ran on HBO from 2010 to 2013, was the most honest, most detailed, and most loving portrait of New Orleans that any major media production has ever attempted.

Simon was already famous for The Wire, his Baltimore crime epic that redefined what television could do. For Treme, he turned his attention to New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, telling the story of musicians, chefs, lawyers, Mardi Gras Indians, and everyday people trying to rebuild their lives and their city.

What made Treme different from other Katrina narratives was its refusal to be simple. The show didn't treat New Orleans as a disaster story. It treated it as a culture story — a city defined by its music, its food, its traditions, and its people, all of which were under threat not just from the storm but from the failures of government, insurance companies, and a national attention span that had already moved on.

The cast was extraordinary: Wendell Pierce, Khandi Alexander, Clarke Peters, John Goodman, Steve Zahn, Melissa Leo, Rob Brown. The music was real — the show featured actual New Orleans musicians playing themselves, and the soundtrack was a four-season education in the breadth and depth of the city's musical heritage.

Treme never got the ratings of The Wire, and it was canceled after four seasons instead of the planned five. But in New Orleans, it's remembered as the show that got it right — that understood the city not as a tourist destination or a tragedy but as a living, breathing, complicated place full of people who love it fiercely and fight for it constantly.

David Simon gave New Orleans something the city had never had before: a television show worthy of its complexity. For that, New Orleans will always be grateful.