Frozen River Oscar nominee Melissa Leo will join former The Wire alums Wendell Pierce (Detective Bunk) and Clarke Peters (Lester Freamon) for HBO’s Treme, the upcoming drama from Wire creator David Simon. Leo will play a civil rights lawyer on the show, set in post-Katrina New Orleans.  The pilot is scheduled to begin shooting later this month. (Variety)

In an October 2007 New Yorker profile piece that ran during the final Wire season, Simon outlined the change in scenery and outlook for the new series, calling it a “smaller, more intimate story about musicians reconstituting their lives.” He added, “This show will be a way of making a visual argument that cities matter. ‘The Wire’ has not really done that…we’ve been so angry about what’s been mangled in public policy, and what’s at stake, that we really didn’t have time to celebrate what the city can be.”