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He has taken on drugs, crime and corruption in Baltimore; and brutalised young soldiers in Iraq. Now David Simon, the creator of the hit TV series The Wire, is to create a drama that treats Hurricane Katrina as an allegory for the financial, social and cultural disasters that have shaken the US over the past year.

The series, called Treme, after a New Orleans neighbourhood, was commissioned by HBO earlier this month after a successful pilot, and will air in the US in 2010. Filming will start later this year – after the hurricane season abates. The 10- or 12-part drama will be, Simon told the Guardian, “an allegory for the trauma that the country as a whole went through two years later.”

‘The fact is that the levees on the canals were substandard, and done on the cheap at an immense profit. Ultimately that becomes a metaphor,’ he said. ‘New Orleans was relying on things that were believed to be genuine bulwarks against tragedy and disaster. People felt that there were similar bulwarks protecting our financial institutions and foreign policy. Now, two years on, we are all essentially in the same boat as New Orleans. Katrina was an outlyer of where we are today….

On Treme, Simon said: ‘It picks up three months after the storm, and will deliver a story of people trying to pick up their lives and culture again. New Orleans is one of the most extraordinary cultural creations in the US in terms of almost every artform – and it is very vulnerable. The characters have to find their way back and try to solve the existential crisis that Katrina has left them.’

The show will be, he said, a ‘homage to one of America’s greatest achievements, African-American music. A thousand years from now, if anyone is talking about anything on this rotating orb, and they mention America, they might talk about constitutional government or democracy or baseball – but they will surely talk about blues and jazz. New Orleans is the cradle of all that.’