Some casting news, as well as some info about the overall content, on Treme.
‘Treme is David Simon’s next project. The planned series (HBO has ordered a pilot, but I can’t imagine the show not getting picked up) is about the City of New Orleans and how it goes about picking up the pieces after Katrina.
The series will reportedly focus on the muscians and give us a look, through their eyes, at how the city is coping.
According to The Hollywood Reporter, The Wire veterans Wendell Pierce (Bunk Moreland) and Clarke Peters (Lester Freeman) have signed on, with Khandi Alexander (News Radio, CSI:Miami) in negotiations.
All three have worked with Simon before. As noted, Pierce and Peters worked on The Wire, but Alexander was on the HBO mini-series The Corner.
Pierce will be playing a Antoine Batiste, “an accomplished jazz trombonist who is now scratching for gigs, trying to support a live-in girlfriend and a new baby”
Alexander will play his ex-wife, a bar owner.
Peters will play “Albert Lambreaux, a big chief of the White Feather Nation trying to bring the tribe’s members home.”
In an article in a New Orleans paper, Simon was quoted as saying: “It’s basically a post-Katrina history of the city. It will be rooted in events that everybody knows…What it’s not going to be is a happy stroll through David Simon’s record collection. It should not be a tourism slide show. If we do it right, it (will be) about why New Orleans matters.”

The article also said the show would ” reach beyond the music scene to explore political corruption, the public housing controversy, the crippled criminal-justice system, clashes between police and Mardi Gras Indians, and the struggle to regain the tourism industry after the storm.”

As I said, I can’t see the show not going to series. Simon has done three previous projects with HBO, The Corner, The Wire and the current mini-series Generation Kill.