Ellen Gray: HBO's new 'Treme': It's all about the city

TREME. 10 p.m. Sunday, HBO.

AS ANYONE who's ever watched "The Wire" or "The Corner" or "Generation Kill" knows, there's no sticking your big toe in to test the water of a David Simon show: It's total immersion all the way.

Over the years, the cop reporter-turned-TV writer and HBO have taken us to places, and introduced us to people most of television prefers to ignore, and they've done it by throwing us into the deep end.

As someone who considers "The Wire" to be possibly the best television series ever made, I'd argue there are worse ways to learn to stay afloat.

But it's a metaphor that probably ought to be checked at the door for Sunday's premiere of HBO's "Treme," the post-Hurricane Katrina drama created by Simon and Eric Overmyer, and not just because the storm-weary people of New Orleans have had enough of sinking and swimming.

This, after all, is a story we all at least think we know, set in a city that sees a lot more tourists than "The Wire's" West Baltimore.

So what if they trip us up with "Treme," which, it turns out, doesn't rhyme with "dream"?

It's trih-MAY, the accent having, like so much in New Orleans, gone missing.

The name belongs to "a neighborhood near the French Quarter," Overmyer told reporters in January. "It's one of the neighborhoods called the Faubourg Treme, where American music and American culture was born, and we felt it stood for a state of mind and a part of the city that . . . didn't show up usually in projects about New Orleans."

He said they'd "talked about putting the accent over the last 'e,' but it seemed sort of fussy. So we figured people would catch up with it sooner or later."

Certainly there's nothing fussy about the almost instantly endearing "Treme," which matches some of the best actors working today with characters worth the hustle you'll need to catch up with their interwoven stories.

The show, which begins just three months after Katrina, keeps a tight focus on its characters, but for those trying to suss out the bigger picture, glimpses emerge through John Goodman. The New Orleans-based actor plays a Tulane professor whose rants to reporters about how little they truly understand about the hurricane and its aftermath may be as educational as they are entertaining.

Goodman's joined by a few veterans of Simon's informal repertory company, including "The Wire's" Wendell Pierce and Clarke Peters, who, respectively, play a musician and Mardi Gras Indian chief; "Homicide: Life on the Street's" Melissa Leo, whose character, a civil rights lawyer, is married to Goodman's professor; and "The Corner's" Khandi Alexander, a bar owner who used to be married to Pierce's character.

(Offscreen, Simon's former collaborators included "The Corner" writer David Mills, a "Treme" co-executive producer who wrote two of the first season's 10 episodes and died of a brain aneurysm last week at the age of 48 after collapsing on the set.)

Kim Dickens ("Deadwood," "Friday Night Lights") plays a restaurant owner trying to keep her seemingly thriving business alive until the insurance pays off. If only she weren't involved with Davis McAlary (Steve Zahn), a self-important stoner who's easily the show's most annoying character but who seems to have been placed there to talk about the music (and to point out a perfectly obvious cameo by Elvis Costello).

Music, as you might expect, is a huge part of "Treme," and you could watch it with your eyes closed and still have a pretty good time.

Simon would probably prefer you kept them open.

"This is a city that is essential in the American psyche, and yet we all witnessed the near destruction of it," he told reporters in January. "It was the closest thing to the destruction of an American city since the San Francisco earthquake, and yet it's coming back on its own terms as best as it can with a lot of concern from some quarters but a lot of indifference from much of the country."

"The Wire," he said, "implied what was at stake with the American city, but 'Treme' is actually an examination of what . . . it is, what living as disparate and different people compacted into an urban area can offer and not offer."

The music is "a hook," he said, "but, really, it's about the city, and I'm hoping that will translate whether or not you have parades every 15 minutes or not in your city."

PBS' "Masterpiece" (9 p.m. Sunday, Channel 12) marks Holocaust Remembrance Day with "The Diary of Anne Frank," a rare dramatization of one of the world's most-read books to be allowed to use excerpts from the diary itself.

Anne's own words, combined with a note-perfect performance by Ellie Kendrick ("An Education") as the brainy, passionate - and very human - teen in hiding from the Nazis, make this "Diary" a page-turner. *

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