Clarke Peters stars as a New Orleans citizen picking up the pieces in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in the new HBO ensemble drama, Treme. (HBO Canada)

The action — what there is of it — in the languid new HBO series Treme is underscored by two distinct soundtracks. One is the juicy funk, jazz and rhythm & blues of New Orleans; the other is the persistent, menacing thwack-thwack-thwack of helicopters patrolling the traumatized city from above.

Co-created by David Simon and Eric Overmyer of The Wire, Treme casts New Orleans’ vibrant history and culture against the fallout of Hurricane Katrina.

Treme takes place in 2005, three months after Hurricane Katrina overwhelmed New Orleans’ neglected infrastructure, flooding 80 percent of the city, killing some 1,500 residents and leaving thousands of others homeless. The on-the-edge police force and National Guard arrest citizens for the slightest infraction; meanwhile, impatience among the locals is at a slow but volatile simmer. Mould is overtaking abandoned houses, many occupied homes are still without electricity and the city’s poorest and most desperate wait helplessly for the promised FEMA trailer or an insurance payout that will enable them to move forward.

Co-created by David Simon and Eric Overmyer of The Wire, Treme casts the city’s vibrant history and culture against the fallout of Katrina. The 10-part series tells overlapping stories of a group of shell-shocked citizens patching their lives together after the storm.

Khandi Alexander plays bar owner LaDonna Batiste Williams in Treme. (HBO Canada)

Wendell Pierce (Bunk from The Wire) plays a flat-broke, skirt-chasing trombone player named Antoine. His tough-cookie ex-wife LaDonna (Khandi Alexander) is a bar owner searching for her missing brother with the help of Toni (Melissa Leo), a leftie lawyer married to a mouthy Tulane University professor (John Goodman). Steve Zahn plays Davis, an insufferable music nerd and radio DJ with a Shaggy chin scruff and John Lennon glasses. Davis’s on-and-off- again lover Janette (Kim Dickens) is a chef struggling to keep her restaurant afloat. The soulful Clarke Peters is Albert, a Mardi Gras Indian Chief trying to reunite the members of his tribe in time for carnival.

Rounding out the superb cast are genuine locals like trumpeter Kermit Ruffins (as himself) and Phyllis Montana Leblanc, the charismatic star of Spike Lee’s 2006 documentary When the Levees Broke, as Antoine’s long-suffering girlfriend. Musicians Elvis Costello, Dr. John and Allen Toussaint show up for cameos.

The series (pronounced “trih-may”) takes its name from the African-American neighbourhood where jazz was born — and like the music, the show has a loose, improvised quality. While the narrative arc of each season of The Wire was meticulously mapped out, Treme is nearly plotless. It’s largely a collection of small, transcendent moments: a funeral march led by a brass band; an impromptu collaboration between Antoine and a pair of street buskers; a late night jam session at a smoky bar. This deep feeling for music and the people who create it is in no small part due to the contributions of the late David Mills, a writer and co-executive producer for the series, who began his career as a music journalist. (Mills died of a brain aneurysm on March 30.)

New Orleans is the most exotic and unlikely of American cities, with a flamboyant and multi-ethnic populace and a temperament more laissez-faire European than work-ethic Puritan. As the left and right in the U.S. continue to grapple over what constitutes the “real America,” Treme argues it exists in the messy, complex, creative pulse of urban life. At times, the show’s creators can wax a little romantic — even in its broken state, the New Orleans in Treme exudes a fairy-tale charm. But the series doesn’t ignore the city’s economic and racial divisions — or its corruption. What’s clear is that the citizens would prefer even an imperfect, battered New Orleans — with its eccentricities and passions — to a mundane life anywhere else.

With so much of what they loved taken by the flood — including the more than 30 percent of the population that moved elsewhere — New Orleans’ remaining residents clutch stubbornly to the city’s esoteric customs. In one haunting scene, Albert suits up in his full chief’s regalia of yellow and crimson feathers and dances through a dark, ravaged street to cajole a friend into helping him clear the rubble from his tribe’s rehearsal space. Across town, Davis hosts an on-air voodoo chicken sacrifice to welcome good spirits to his radio station, which had to relocate to the French Quarter — a tourist-trap neighbourhood that the natives view as the Epcot version of New Orleans.

Melissa Leo and John Goodman co-star in Treme. (Paul Schiraldi/HBO Canada)

Post-Katrina, the mild irritation that locals feel towards the horny out-of-towners puking up hurricanes on Bourbon Street has curdled into contempt. In fact, the tour buses and visiting TV crews seem like jackals. “Everyone loves New Orleans music,” Albert gripes to his son, before asking, “But New Orleans people?” He doesn’t wait for an answer. It’s all around him: in the schools that have yet to reopen, the bodies left to rot, the businesses flailing because there’s no one to fill the jobs. Played by anyone other than Peters (Lester Freamon on The Wire), the righteous, dignified Albert could veer into Magical Negro territory; instead, the actor finds a cruel streak in the man’s obstinacy. He’d abandon his kids and resort to violence to protect the remains of his city.

Despair is captured in the smallest details: a glimpse of the boarded-up windows of the Preservation Hall, a passing shot of the spray paint on a flooded home indicating the number of dead found inside. In trying to do justice to the citizens and their suffering, Treme’s writers can, at times, be a little too on the nose. When Goodman’s perpetually outraged professor tells a journalist that “the flooding of New Orleans was a man-made catastrophe, a federal f----up of epic proportions,” he is preaching to the choir. And that’s the problem: He’s preaching.

Much more is illuminated by what’s not said. Janette’s standard response to queries about the state of her home is “Don’t ask me about my f---ing house.” Davis wages a battle against his gay neighbours, people he’s never deigned to speak to, because he assumes they’re gentrifying carpetbaggers. As it turns out, they’re proud sons of New Orleans, too, trying to save the city in their own way. And running underneath LaDonna’s bravado is an unacknowledged current of panic. No one is at ease anymore in The Big Easy.

At one point, Davis moans, “I want my city back.” Five years later, New Orleans has yet to return to what it was. But, as Treme reveals, in its fertile streets, kitchens, clubs and neighbourhoods, its essence lives on.

Treme premieres on April 11 on HBO Canada.

Rachel Giese is a writer based in Toronto.