While the anticipation for The Wire's fifth and final season (beginning in January) has reached "Christmas when you were 8-years-old" levels around here, creator David Simon has given fans something to chew on in the interim: his next planned HBO series. For the first time in his television career, Simon will leave the gritty streets of Baltimore behind for New Orleans with a show about musicians rebuilding their lives in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. About the as-yet unnamed series, Simon says:
"This show will be a way of making a visual argument that cities matter. The Wire has never done that. I certainly never said or wanted to say that Baltimore is not worth saving, or that it can't be saved. But I think some people watching the show think, 'Why don't they just move away?'"
Although Simon's new series hasn't even entered pre-production stages, television critics have already hailed it as "an unfairly ignored masterpiece of Shakespearean proportions."