David Simon in New Orleans

Big piece in the NYT Magazine about David Simon and the new show Treme, an ensemble drama set in post-Katrina New Orleans. The last thing you read about Simon probably had something to do with how angry the last season of The Wire was. It's a relief to find Simon somewhat tongue-tied for once; much is made of his difficulties in describing the premise of Treme to HBO executives. There's an important difference between Treme and The Wire:

“Treme,” though no less focused on the workings and failings of 21st-century American urban existence, tells its story not through a city’s institutions but through its individuals. It isn’t that “The Wire” lacked for distinctive characters: Omar, the homicidal ethicist; Bubbles, the embattled addict; D’Angelo Barksdale, the doomed-by-decency street dealer — there were scores of them. But because so many of the show’s story lines dramatized the futility of any of these characters’ attempts to break through social and economic ceilings, the image of contemporary urban America that the show offered was one in which character wasn’t fate so much as a fait accompli: in the land of the free market, Simon was arguing, free will wasn’t going to get you very far. In “Treme,” Simon seems to be arguing for the very opposite idea: the triumph of the individual will despite all impediments, a show about people, artists for the most part, whose daily lives depend upon the free exercise of their wills to create — out of nothing, out of moments — something beautiful.