Treme

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/21/magazine/21simon-t.html

Article about David Simon’s (the man behind “The Wire”) new TV series set in New Orleans. While I knew that “The Wire” was a brilliant show, this excerpt came as quite a surprise:

If likening Simon repeatedly to Dickens and Dreiser, Balzac and Tolstoy and Shakespeare hasn’t proved adequately exalting, Bill Moyers lately freshened things up by calling Simon “our Edward Gibbon,” while the literary critic Walter Benn Michaels went so far as to suggest that the beauty and difficulty of watching “The Wire” in English — the multifarious 21st-century English of Baltimore detectives and drug dealers — compares with that of reading Dante in 14th-century Italian. It should go without saying that Duke; the University of California, Berkeley; and, next term, Harvard, are offering courses on the series, seminars focused not merely on the sophistication of its storytelling but also on its sociological and political perspicacity.

It would kick so much butt to take a class like that =).