Viewers to be challenged by the real New Orleans

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The last time writer-producer David Simon tried a television series on HBO, it was viewed as a sort of social experiment: could you tell the day-to-day story of one of the bleakest corners of American civilisation to a comfortable audience that can afford to add HBO to their cable bills?

The answer to that show, The Wire, was a resounding yes.

So, he's done it again.

Simon will be the first to say that Treme, set in New Orleans in 2005, three months after the levees broke, is not The Wire. And in many ways he is right. But in the sense that he is again challenging viewers to peer deep into their big screens and make sense of a world utterly alien to their own, Treme is yet another powerful addition to an oeuvre that includes not just The Wire but also the 2008 Iraq War miniseries, Generation Kill.

In some ways, though, Treme (pronounced "trah-MAY") may be the most arduous challenge of all.

In Treme, you see a group of fictional families trying, with varying degrees of success, to put their lives together after the storm. As with everything else Simon has done, it is scripted drama with the authority of documentary.

But documentaries often come with explanatory graphics, or verite narrators to help the uninitiated ease into the film. Not so with Treme, beginning with the name of the show itself.

Treme is a very old neighbourhood, the earliest hub of free African-Americans in the city, and the home of Congo Square, the place where jazz was born. It's also a place where only the most experienced tourists know to go.

And it's the ideal place to centre a show that is about neighbourhoods devastated by the waters (unlike the French Quarter), populated by musicians and other ordinary folk who make New Orleans New Orleans (unlike the French Quarter), where the city's unique culture is lived and breathed, not just retailed for tourists (unlike ... you get the point).

It must be said, though, that viewers will find watching Treme tough.

• Treme screens Thursdays at 9.30pm on SoHo (Sky channel 10).