Last Night, HBO premiered Treme, a new series set in New Orleans after Katrina. The series is produced by the same people who produced The Wire, one of the best television series ever. It also features some of the same stars including Wendell Pierce.
This new series may not reach the level of The Wire, but I started wonder if students and teachers twenty or thirty years from now will have "must have viewed" lists like we have "must have read lists." I don't believe books are going extinct, but their impact on culture may not be as great as it was for previous generations. So, will everyone look at Tony Soprano or Greg House as the epitome of contemporary tragic heroes? Will Mad Men be the example that one uses for verisimilitude or Saving Grace the standard for internal conflict? And finally in the spirit of asking too many weird questions, what would the canon contain? Everyone agrees that people read a Shakespeare play or three along with Eliot's, Frost's, and Whitman's poetry for example; what are the ten films or TV programs that would go on the list? (My apologies for only including the dead white males on the literature list.)
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