Opening credits for TV shows are, as of late, a lost art, which makes the introduction for HBO’s sprawling, stunning Treme all the more precious:

A rollicking, brass-accented tune about hanging with your baby in the titular New Orleans neighborhood accompanies scenes of the city’s glorious gentility as well as the molded and mildewed destruction that followed 2005′s Hurricane Katrina.

Like the weakened levees that surrounded the city, producer David Simon is interested in those elements — structural, human, political and emotional — that cracked and buckled before the rains started.

So the varied group of characters we meet are in for a bumpy ride in this most paradoxical of cities, where every triumphant parade goes past a building with a body in it, but every funeral erupts into singing.

Treme is set in New Orleans a few months after the storm, and Simon immediately gives it the same critical, yet toughly loving treatment he gave Baltimore in his previous projects The Wire, The Corner and Homicide: Life On The Street.

New Orleans is defined by the uneasy relationships between race, class, tradition, tourism and commerce, and Simon, like few other producers currently working, jumps into those relationships with both feet.

And even when the questions he poses yield more questions than answers, he and his excellent cast — including John Goodman, Steve Zahn and some Simon alumni (The Wire‘s Wendell Pierce and Clarke Peters, Homicide‘s Melissa Leo and The Corner‘s Khandi Alexander) — boldly keep going.

The series is not perfect — there are a few minor characters that don’t ring true, like a band of goofy white Habitat for Humanity workers who wander off looking for the "authentic" New Orleans to humorous effect.

Pierce, a New Orleans native who provided the bittersweet heart of Spike Lee’s Katrina documentary When The Levees Broke, is the soul of Treme, as philandering, smooth-talking trombone player Antoine.

A guy who can charm any taxi driver, stripper or clueless tourist around, Antoine is one of those guys whose luck seems to change with every slide of a trombone. His belief in his ability to get himself out of a jam never fades, even when the jam is of his own making.

Antoine and his fellow residents of the Treme find themselves navigating a city struggling to find its balance even as it reveals that it was never all that balanced to begin with.

Albert (the regal Peters) tries to rebuild both his bar and his Mardi Gras Indian crew as he tries to protect himself from the desperate and the criminal who steal his tools to sell for cash and food.

Professor Creighton (John Goodman at his rumpled best) defends the city in expletive-filled radio interviews but has no problem with local public school students being displaced so that rich charter school kids like his daughter can use the building.

And Davis (Steve Zahn) a pushing-40 slacker who survives by his wits and donations from his rich parents, represents the complications of complaining about The Man while still accepting The Man’s handouts.

Those looking for the extreme violence or criminality of The Wire won’t find it here, at least not in Treme‘s first few episodes. But an air of unease is present, through the scenes of cops rousting black guys just hanging out on the street, or how a van of tourists feels no compunction about interrupting a rag-tag jazz funeral in front of a damaged house.

That unease, Simon seems to be saying, is everywhere, in every city where unseen masses change the beds and stay out of sight, and the sweet, whispery music hides a moan you won’t hear unless you listen really closely.

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