It is said that when the final episode of The Wire was transmitted in 2008, the flicker of synchronised hand-wringing was visible from space. So Sunday's US premiere of Treme, a new series about post-Katrina New Orleans by The Wire's creator David Simon, had been anticipated by his fans with the kind of fervour normally reserved by Christians for the rapture.
Thus far, the critics have been kind-to-gushing. Mary McNamara of the Los Angeles Times was keenest, declaring Simon to have "proved that television as an art form can not only rival Dickens, but it also can hold its own against Wagner". And, in more sober language, the Washington Post's Hank Stuever agrees. "It's quite good," he says. "Sunday's episode is nearly flawless and a textbook example of how to launch an ensemble saga." Altogether, says Randee Dawn in the Hollywood Reporter, "it's all done so masterfully that by the third instalment, Treme has the old-shoe feeling of a series that has been on for years."
Less impressed, however, were the people of New Orleans. "The first glaring mistake that I saw was in the scene driving over the Crescent City Connection and seeing a gleaming white roof on the Superdome," says one enraged posting on the website of the Times-Picayune newspaper. "Three months after the storm, that roof was brown and ripped to shreds." "And why do they keep calling it Carnival??" another wants to know. "It's frickin Mardi Gras!"
