The Bunk is Back!

Well, close enough, anyway. The great Wendell Pierce, who played Bunk in The Wire (which is still must-see TV around our HQ), has a similar character in a new show called Treme. The show also just happens to star Clarke Peters (Lester Freamon from The Wire) and is produced, directed and written by largely the same talented folks who brought you that show.



Set in the Tremé district of New Orleans in the aftermath of Katrina, the show immediately throws us into the lives of many different characters at once, leaving us to swim in the currents of exposition until we get a handle on who these people are and what they're doing.

I'm still not quite finished piecing that together myself, but John Goodman plays a character named Creighton who is so Walter Sobchak-esque, it scares me. Steve Zahn (did you know he lives in Kentucky now?) plays a suitably irksome-but-lovable music geek and radio DJ. The aforementioned Wendell Pierce is Antoine, a ramblin', gamblin' rounder and jazz trombonist, and Clarke Peters is Albert (say it French, though - Al-bair) who is more than a little eccentric in his noble determination to reorganize his Indian tribe.

Elvis Costello makes a cameo appearance, as himself, in a down-and-dirty jazz bar in the pilot.


(One criticism: characters in the show use the phrase "Not so much" in a post-Borat manner not once but twice in the pilot episode. But the show takes place almost a year before Borat hit theaters.)

- - JSH