I’ve been reading everything I see on David Simon’s new show Treme set to premiere tomorrow on HBO, including last month’s expansive profile in The New York Times Magazine.

Slate’s Troy Patterson has a more digestible summary of the show, and the first graf pretty well sums it up.

If you need an introduction to David Simon, then this article will be useless to you, and you need to address your cultural illiteracy by arranging an enviable first screening of The Wire, his Baltimore epic. If you do not need an introduction to David Simon, then you do not need an article to tell you what a pleasure it is to watch Treme (HBO, Sundays at 10 p.m.), the new New Orleans-set drama, created by Simon and Eric Overmyer, that exhibits the potential to emerge, like The Wire, as a rich and complicated portrait of the urban South. If you do not think that Baltimore is in the South, then think again, hon. If you are familiar with Simon’s work and do not admire it, then you have my condolences.

All this obsession, and I don’t even have HBO.