David Simon set out to celebrate the city he loved — New Orleans — with its vibrant culture of music, food, and passion for life. What he found was a modern metaphor for the current state of America. A devastated city trying to rebuild itself, from the ground up, with nothing to lean on but its own indomitable spirit. We sat down with David to discuss the show, its genesis, and the upcoming Season 3, as well as the city itself and its culture. What follows are excerpts of our interview that take us into the heart of American culture and into the heart of Treme.

When it came time for you to develop a new series, what is it that drew you to New Orleans?

Well, Katrina, obviously. And the flood that followed. The botched flood control in New Orleans. It was a profound moment in terms of the life of an American city. It was the near death of an American city. I was familiar with New Orleans. I’ve been going down there since I was in my late 20s and I was very much a devotee of the town.

My creative partner, Eric Overmyer, had a house down there. We didn’t want to do another cop show or anything like that. What we were really taken by was the extraordinary petri dish of organic American culture that that city has always been. That’s interesting. The power of culture in American life. How you get to that, we had no idea. We talked about it. We never actually tried to pitch it to anybody, because if you can explain New Orleans in a room to somebody, you wouldn’t have to do the show.

I see it as a metaphor for what ails us at this point. If you look at what happened in New Orleans in 2005 in terms of what people of that city assumed in regard to everything, as fundamental as their flood control system and what was protecting their society and the safeguards that were supposed to be in place, in the sense that they were part of the American collective, that if something bad happened to them, there would be a collective impulse to a rescue and recommitment and rebuilding.

I think it’s entirely allegorical to what happened in the country as a whole three years later. With what happened to our fiscal safeguards, and to the idea that there was the American collective and that we were all in this together and that we weren’t part of just a grand Ponzi scheme on the part of unrestrained capitalism. I think what New Orleans went through in 2005 was entirely allegorical to what the rest of the country is still doing. In terms of the faith that we place in our own infrastructure in this country as a viable national enterprise. That is obviously another reason for us to do the story. I think it has a telling lesson. New Orleans has learned those lessons that the rest of us are still learning.

What are things like on the ground these days, over there?

I would say 70 percent of the city is back. Between 60 and 70 percent of the city in terms of population. But what proved to be the only weapon in the arsenal for New Orleanians for their city that worked, the only effective weapon, turned out to be their culture.

By reasserting the unique aspects of New Orleans and its culture, be it music or dance, theater, the culture of Carnival itself, or cuisine. These things ultimately were restorative in a way that the political system and all of the other institutional stalwarts you would expect, you know, the school system, the police department, city hall, weren’t. Those things didn’t work like they should. And the federal money didn’t go where it was supposed to go and a lot of it was siphoned off. And a lot of the local leadership proved to be corrupt.

There’s a lot that is very wrong about this city, and yet the pride and the determination with which people pursue life there is rooted in the fact that they are creating culture on a daily basis, and using it as a fuel. That to me is fascinating. Of all the things that you can rely on, in the wake of the near death of your city, culture would not be high up on the list of need for most American cities. But in New Orleans, it was pretty much all that worked.

Season 3 is starting September 23 at 10pm ET/PT. What can viewers look forward to?

There are some characters who are going to have to either deepen or relinquish their commitment to the city, their idea of New Orleans as a community, and their place in that community. They are going to be tested. And one of the things that is going to test them is the arrival of certain opportunities, and what those opportunities offer for New Orleans and its future and what those opportunities do not offer. And they are going to have to decide whether to jump or not.

That is indicative of what New Orleans was looking at when money and plans and theories and political discussions of the city’s future began to harden and solidify a few years after the storm. And other characters are going to have to continue to acquire whatever truth they can about what happened and is happening in their city, and why it continues to happen, in terms of corruption and government.

And other people are going to have to fight for culture, as they always have to fight for culture in streets and in the clubs and kitchens on a daily basis. I think all the characters are going to be faced with some critical choices about what is required for their city to come back and for them to find their place in it.

Again, we hope that’s metaphorical for Americans. It’s bigger than just New Orleans. If we’d done a show that’s just about New Orleans and didn’t speak to the sense of political, social, and economic dislocation that Americans feel right now, about their own place in society and their own sense of the American collective...if we’ve failed to connect with that, then I’m not sure the journey was worth it. I feel that by the end, by the time we get to the end of our story, that’ll be clear. You’ve got to remember we’re now approaching the point in 2008 when the market collapsed.

There’s a lot to New Orleans. You can’t boil it down without putting it on display and that is part of the problem. But if you think about it, if America disappeared today, what would be our greatest gift to the rest of the world, to the rest of humanity? It’s African American music. It’s the combination of West African rhythm and the blues scale, combined with European arrangement instrumentation to make an art form, which has invaded everything from blues to jazz to hip hop to rock ’n’ roll, that has gone around the world 10 times over.

Do you have any favorite musical moments from the show that stick out in your mind?

Every now and then we force some alchemy on the musicians, for whatever perverse reasons we have, the needs of the scene, or what we are trying to convey in certain moments. We’re asking musicians to do certain things that they wouldn’t do otherwise. And I have great affection for those moments, because it wouldn’t happen without the show endeavoring to film them. And the New Orleans music community is so supportive of the show, and so willing to let us play with all of the disparate pieces. Sometimes the alchemy works magically.

There was a moment where Juvenile and Galactic and the Dirty Dozen Brass Band all were on stage in Season 2, I think the first episode, doing ‘From the Corner of the Block,’ sort of the hip hop brass version of ‘From the Corner of the Block,’ which I felt was magnificent.

And similarly in Season 1, the great bluesman John Mooney, great slide guitar player, did a version of ‘Drink a Little Poison’ with the Soul Rebels Brass Band. Those two had never played together. John Mooney had never played with the Soul Rebels, they had never played with John Mooney. The Soul Rebels weren’t hip to the song, but after a couple of hours of rehearsal they produced something that we were so delighted with it’s on the first CD that we did.

It’s definitely a cultural triumph of the laboring class of the black community in New Orleans. It goes back more than 100 years. It’s part of the Mardi Gras tradition of masking.

There was all kinds of white worry in New Orleans about blacks masking. Being able to hide their identity even for the short period of Carnival. This history of Carnival in New Orleans goes back to, of course, its time under the French. But the adoption of the American Indian as iconic by black Americans in New Orleans I think had everything to do with the natural opposition of Native Americans and whites.

It was a very delicate and clever way of standing in opposition against segregationist white New Orleans and white society. Doing so in a way that was glorious and beautiful and charming. They were basically saying, in that fight, we’re with the Indians. We’re not with the cowboys, we’re with the Indians.

So it became a very prideful way of exhibiting bravado and manhood and a sense of community in black neighborhoods to the point where people began masking as Indians, then they had gangs. There’s probably 40, 50, 60 Mardi Gras Indian gangs now.

There’s a few things. One of which was, we weren’t on the air until 2010. Nearly five years, four and a half years after Katrina. So that really constituted about four and a half years of research.

But the other thing that you have to do is that you have to gird yourself and gird your writing staff with people who are from New Orleans. I wouldn’t want to disempower the voice of New Orleanians in any part of the production process. From the writer's room to the locations, to the props department, to the acting pool. You’ve got to keep your ears open. You’ve got to empower people to kick in and to contribute.

Your characters are so vibrant and real. How do you get so intimately into the minds of such disparate characters?

You’ve got to think about the character hard. You’ve got to research people who were experiencing life similarly to your character. You’ve got to get close to that and learn what you can. And as far as acquiring different voices, you’ve got to have an ear. You’ve got to be interested in how people talk; you’ve got to be on the lookout for those wonderful variances in the American language that happen wherever you go, racial differences, class differences, geographic differences. You’ve got to love how people talk. You’ve got to have some real affection for the real.

But, you know, I think that’s always the battle, to have all of your characters be complete people and live in their own skin, and give the actor a complete person, too. And they create along with you.