Your next box set: Treme

It was never going to be easy for David Simon's first full series since The Wire. But Treme , the slow-burn story of post-Katrina New Orleans , turns a new page (once you manage to stop playing spot-the-person-who-was-in-The-Wire, that is). Treme exposes a damaged system that notoriously came to the rescue of none of its people . But there are other delights along the way, such as the French-infused language and the carnival processions ; both get you inside this place and its history, making you root for its citizens. It has been criticised for being plot-light, almost listless, but the whole series works like a meandering melody, sometimes richocheting off into snappy, yappy set-tos, sometimes lilting and slurring through a long night of live jazz and triple bourbons. Music is Treme's bloodline, as it is the city's, and – thanks to all the performers, radio station insiders, street buskers and airport bands – it takes us into every area of life, building up a cross section of a city struggling to find its feet again. Antoine Batiste (Wendell Pierce) is the hard-up trombonist who takes cabs everywhere and does a runner from every fare; his ex-wife LaDonna Batiste-Williams (Khandi Alexander) is hunting for her brother Daymo, who has been wrongfully swallowed up by the prison system; Toni Bernette (Melissa Leo) is the hard-nosed lawyer who's leading LaDonna's search; and Creighton (John Goodman) is her husband, who is uploading rants on YouTube. Then there's Big Chief Albert Lambreaux (Clarke Peters), sewing away with his gang in a derelict bar to finish their Mardi Gras Indian costumes in time. While a couple of the characters are gratingly self-involved (the talentless Sonny, the galling DJ Davis) the main thrust of Treme is deeply compelling: here is a community encouraging each other not to jack it all in, not to jump ship. As if all that wasn't enough, at one point Goodman appears dressed as a giant sperm, surrounded by sperm minions, all following a carnival float bearing an effigy of the New Orleans mayor masturbating. Kate Abbott