Last month, HBO released a “teaser” for its highly anticipated series Tremé. Today brought the first official trailer for the show, which premieres on the cable network Apr. 11. Like the earlier teaser, it looks pretty damn spectacular; see if you recognize some faces you know from around town. (If the trailer gets yanked off YouTube and the embed below doesn’t work, check it out on the HBO site.)

Those of us who have become used to the local comings and goings of the crews for Tremé might be surprised to know that even New Orleans can’t play New Orleans on film all the time. Courtesy of the blog NewYorkShitty comes this image of a flyer posted in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, advising residents that their neighborhood will be doubling as the Crescent City for some night shooting this Saturday evening.

This from the flyer, however, is cause for pause:

It is the heartwarming story of the residents of New Orleans Ninth Ward attempting to rebuild their lives after the devastation of Hurricane Katrina.

Heartwarming? That’s Touched by an Angel stuff. We can hope that’s shorthand for “gritty drama, leavened with the weary, knowing sophistication and bawdy humor that so characterizes the Jewel of the South.”

But what of Greenpoint? Looking it up on a map, it’s scarily adjacent to Williamsburg, that district of Brooklyn where Hasidim and hipsters have been on a collision course lately. The Web site Not for Tourists characterizes Greenpoint as a Polish enclave being inevitably hipsterized, and adds:

One exciting aspect of Greenpoint (though not for locals with cars) is the frequent number of movie and television productions being filmed here at any given time. Again, because of its proximity to Manhattan and Long Island City (where a number of studios are based), Greenpoint serves as an ideal location for a production that is looking for a green, industrial, or cozy neighborhood setting.

Green? Industrial? Cozy? Our L9W???

We’ll see — obviously we have a lot of trust in David Simon, but some of us remember the disastrous results the last time a foreign location was used to represent the Big Easy.

Google is like a box of chocolates. You never know what you’ll get. David Simon’s “Treme” trailer after the jump.

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There’s Tinseltown stardust in the air for our local investigative TV guys, it seems. First now-retired Richard Angelico turns TV pitchman for a cash-for-gold company (would someone please upload that to YouTube?), and then Travers Mackel, we hear, has filmed a Mackel-evellian cameo for David Simon’s new series Tremé. But none of these star turns can compete with Peabody award-winning journalist Lee Zurik, who is making his debut as a flea in the Contemporary Arts Center’s upcoming production of Fantastic Mr. Fox.

Gambit’s own I-Team has obtained footage of “Flea Zurik” (which will no doubt be played on an endless loop at City Hall) and we’re presenting it here for the first time. Enjoy.

Since the weather outside is (about to be) frightful and tonight’s parade schedule has been cancelled, why not pull on your Saints snuggie, fire up the tube and watch people collect garbage for an hour enjoy the TV debut of New Orleans’ own Sidney Torres and Trashmen, his reality-series pilot that airs tonight at 9 p.m. on TLC.

There’s scant info about it on the TLC Web site, but here’s the network’s description:

Sidney Torres is one of New Orleans’ toughest sons and has made cleaning up the city his business. After Katrina, waste management companies fled like scared rabbits, but Sidney bought a garbage truck to take on the dirtiest job around.

You want more? We got more:

New Orleans garbage man Sidney Torres is proof that trash makes for good TV. Torres is famous for managing to do what no one else has - cleanup after the massive parties on New Orleans’ world famous Bourbon Street - and look good doing it. Now, the city’s own “Rembrandt of Refuse” shows the world how he gets it done in TLC’s new pilot TRASHMEN…

The hour-long episode features Sidney and his trash troops keeping it clean on Halloween weekend, one of the busiest of the year in the Big Easy. Tens of thousands of people pack Bourbon Street, while another 100,000 more flock to Voo Doo Fest, a major annual outdoor concert. To cap off the busy weekend, the New Orleans Saints will be playing on Monday Night in the Super Dome - yet another big job for Sidney’s crew. These are huge demands for his upstart company and he relies on his trusted team to pull it off. With his best friend, Lenny Kravitz, headlining Voo Doo Fest, which Sidney is also tasked to keep clean, he works to find balance between his life and work. Sidney’s reputation is on the line as everyone from city officials to local residents are depending on Sidney to leave the place spotlessly clean.

Anyway, Sidney’s pretty excited about it over on his Web site and his Twitter stream (only 130 followers? c’mon, New Orleans!) if you want to read more. And here’s a 30-second teaser, titled “Jason Throws a Fit,” in which we learn that fit-throwing may make for mildly diverting and heavily bleeped “reality” TV, but is completely unacceptable as Sidney works to find balance between his life and work.

Tune in tonight to see who scores higher on the Awesome-O-Meter: Sidney Torres, Trashman — or Steven Seagal, Lawman.

It takes some doing to kerfuffle both the readers of the Daily Kos and, say, Michelle Malkin, but Audi managed to do it during last night’s Super Bowl with its “Green Police” commercial. Here it is:

In precis: Cheap Trick sing a version of their insanely catchy “Dream Police” retitled “Green Police,” in which Americans are busted for using incandescent lights, requesting plastic bags at the grocery store, not composting orange parings and a host of other infractions. At the end, an Audi driver sails past a Green Police checkpoint while a title card appears: “Green has never felt so right.”

The problem is that in our black-and-white, liberal-and-conservative, spell-it-all-out world, no one seems to know whether Audi was making fun of the eco-conscious, or cheering for the eco-conscious — and without that spelled out plainly in Big Capital Letters, those on both sides of the issue could agree on one thing: They didn’t like it. (For similar suspicious, puzzled reactions from polar opposite ends of the eco-spectrum, go here and here. Bonus points if you can count the number of people who say some sort of variation on “I’ve got as much of a sense of humor as anyone, but…)

So what was the intent of the commercial? To get people talking about Audi, of course. And by that standard, it was a success. Did it make me want to buy one? No, but it did make me want to get a copy of Cheap Trick’s greatest hits.

Edited to add: Now CBS News is weighing in on the puzzlement:

Environmentalists weren’t sure whether to celebrate or denigrate the spot. Grist magazine’s David Roberts writes that at first blush it seemed like an appeal “to angry white men with the same old stereotype of environmentalists as meddling do-gooders obsessed with picayune behavioral sins.”

“The more I’ve thought about it, though, the more [that] interpretation just doesn’t quite fit,” he goes on to say. “The thrill at the end, when they guy gets to accelerate away from the crowd, turns on satisfying the green police — not rejecting or circumventing them, but satisfying their strict standards. The authority of the green police is taken for granted, never questioned. If you’re looking to appeal to mooks who think the green police are full of it and have no authority, moral or otherwise, why would you make a commercial like that?”

Conservatives also seem to be split: While Newsbusters writes, seemingly approvingly, of the spot’s “futurist vision of environmentalism running amok,” Bob Ellis called it an “downright offensive” and “presented with too much seriousness to be taken any other way than as approval of such Gestapo tactics.”

And sometimes a car commercial is just a car commercial.

At the final televised mayoral primary debate Feb. 4 on WWL-TV, all six candidates had the chance to take their last shots at their opponents. Frontrunner Mitch Landrieu was the big target, but John Georges, Troy Henry and Rob Couhig all came in for some drive-by criticism from other candidates.

Early in the debate, in a question about community policing, Landrieu made a reference to NOPD officers in communities meeting citizens, “not just as a Gestapo.” The Georges campaign jumped on the choice of words; within an hour of the debate’s end, they had issued a press release blast headlined “LANDRIEU: NOPD IS A GESTAPO” and calling on the candidate to apologize.

But it was Couhig who seized the opportunity to bring up the issue that had been hot gossip in local political circles for nearly a week: the discovery of a 1980 photograph from a party at Tulane’s Delta Kappa Epsilon (DKE) fraternity, in which several members posed for photographs in blackface. John Georges was a member of the frat at the time, and would become its president in 1981.

In answering a question about how the next mayor would heal the racial divisions in New Orleans, Georges stressed the diverse makeup of his company, Imperial Trading, noting his employees were “50 percent African American, 50 percent female and the leadership of my company is African American.” That left an opening for Couhig to parry, “There’s a bigger issue out here, and it has to do with Mr. Georges. I was so disappointed today when I was presented with evidence that an organization he ran had people in blackface parading around. How can you be mayor if you condone that in an organization you were the president of?”

Georges, seated directly to Couhig’s left, replied, “You know, you don’t respond to blogs. It’s not true. Those are all misrepresentations. I never condone anything such [sic], and it’s just last-minute political tactics.”

The blog in question, American Zombie (theamericanzombie.blogspot.com), had on Feb. 2 published several photographs from Tulane yearbooks featuring the Dekes in various party-animal shots, some of which included members dressed in blackface at a yearly event called the Debutramp Ball. While the blog’s author, Jason Berry (no relation to the local Catholic Church sex-scandal historian of the same name) did not claim Georges was one of the men in blackface, the photos did establish that the fraternity had worn blackface in 1980, when Georges was a member. He became president of DKE the following year, and the Debutramp Balls continued through the 1980s before DKE had its charter permanently revoked by Tulane University in 1987 after a blackface march near campus.

Reached the day after the debate for comment, Georges spokesperson Helena Moreno said, “John made a public statement on the issue last night during the debate that he won. On the contrary, we are waiting for Mitch Landrieu to explain himself to the men and women of the New Orleans Police Department after calling them the Gestapo.”

Super Bowl commercials are all about celebrating the things that we, as a nation, unanimously like: beer, dancing animals, cars and half-naked women. Not wanting to get anyone riled up during this completely non-polarizing, non-aggressive television event, CBS has typically avoided airing commercials with heavy-handed political themes. By that standard, this 2004 ad from the United Church of Christ was deemed inappropriate:

Fair enough? Fast forward to this year, when CBS has green-lit Focus on the Family’s anti-abortion commercial featuring Tim Tebow. So, a commercial about inclusive worship environments is nixed because it contains ”implicit’ endorsement for a side in a public debate,” (per CBS policy) but the FOTF spot is OK?

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Banish all memories of John Georges‘ “pet the dog” ad from your mind. Forget James Perry’s “are you s**tting me?” commercial. This is the most memorable TV ad of the 2010 race so far, aimed straight at the heart (and spleen) of New Orleans’ Morgus-loving public. Ladies and gentlemen, set your phasers for awesome; it’s Dr. Dwight McKenna for coroner:

* hat tip Library Chronicles

Coming in April from HBO. Here’s a 45-second teaser.

What do we think, Gambiteers? Like? Dislike? If you don’t have HBO, would you get it just to watch this?