The Guardian:
He has taken on drugs, crime and corruption in Baltimore; and brutalised young soldiers in Iraq. Now David Simon, the creator of the hit TV series The Wire, is to create a drama that treats Hurricane Katrina as an allegory for the financial, social and cultural disasters that have shaken the US over the past year.
The series, called Treme, after a New Orleans neighbourhood, was commissioned by HBO earlier this month after a successful pilot, and will air in the US in 2010. Filming will start later this year – after the hurricane season abates. The 10- or 12-part drama will be, Simon told the Guardian, "an allegory for the trauma that the country as a whole went through two years later".
"The fact is that the levees on the canals were substandard, and done on the cheap at an immense profit. Ultimately that becomes a metaphor," he said. "New Orleans was relying on things that were believed to be genuine bulwarks against tragedy and disaster. People felt that there were similar bulwarks protecting our financial institutions and foreign policy. Now, two years on, we are all essentially in the same boat as New Orleans. Katrina was an outlyer of where we are today."
Simon, whose The Wire has been hailed as a masterpiece of novelistic, sophisticated television was speaking to the Guardian ahead of his appearance at the Guardian Hay festival, which opens tomorrow. Simon will be speaking at the festival on 30 May about his book The Corner, an account by him and his collaborator, Ed Burns, of a year spent observing life on the street in West Baltimore. The book, published in the US in 1997, became the basis of The Wire, along with Homicide, Simon's earlier book about the year he spent shadowing officers in the Baltimore Police Department.
Read the rest here.
More later.
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Why does all this news have to come from the UK? I suppose there isn't enough time to cover Brittany, Adam, Lindsey and enough left to cover things like this.
ReplyDeleteI will read the Guardian more often now, if I want news about the USA.