Welcome to the weekly TV thread.

Every Original TV Score Selection of the Week in February is from a “first Black something” or a TV project that was created or helmed by a Black writer or filmmaker.

The Original TV Score Selection of the Week is “Levees” from Terence Blanchard’s original score to When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts, the 2006 HBO docuseries directed by Spike Lee.

Blanchard, a jazz trumpeter and Lee’s longtime composer, hails from New Orleans. (My favorite score he wrote for Lee is from Malcolm X.) Blanchard and his mother Wilhelmina appeared in When the Levees Broke, a remarkable docuseries that humanized the victims of Hurricane Katrina. It delved into the government’s failure to maintain the levees properly, which Blanchard described as something that “wasn’t an act of violence; it was an act of negligence” in a 2015 interview with the Baton Rouge newspaper The Advocate. The most memorable moment in When the Levees Broke is Blanchard and his mother weeping together as they return to her old house in New Orleans’s Pontchartrain Park neighborhood and find it in ruins.

The trumpeter channeled his anger and grief over the lives who were lost into his When the Levees Broke score, which he adapted into the 2007 Blue Note album A Tale of God’s Will (A Requiem for Katrina). From the 2017 World Soundtrack Awards, here are Blanchard and the Brussels Philharmonic performing “Levees.”

Blanchard described his thought process for composing the When the Levees Broke score in a 2007 interview with WNET’s Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly.

“Well, when Spike put together the first two hours of the documentary, the first thing I realized was it’s all about the story,” said Blanchard to R&E. “You know, when you listen to those interviews, when you listen to those who were actually in the aftermath of the hurricane tell their stories of survival and struggle, the first thing that I thought was the music doesn’t need to be traditionally New Orleans music. It doesn’t need to be angry music because their anger is very prevalent in their stories. The music just needs to be the glue to kind of bring all these elements together and not get in the way of any of those stories.”

It’s a powerful score for an infuriating (and occasionally funny in unexpected ways) docuseries. I hope When the Levees Broke and its 2010 follow-up, If God Is Willing and da Creek Don’t Rise, get the Criterion Collection treatment someday.

In addition to When the Levees Broke and If God Is Willing, I wish Frank’s Place—the late Hugh Wilson’s one-season wonder about a Creole restaurant in New Orleans—and Reservation Dogs received the Criterion Collection treatment as well. Today’s prompt is: Robert Altman and Garry Trudeau’s Tanner ’88, Barry Jenkins’s The Underground Railroad, and Steve McQueen’s terrific Small Axe anthology series are examples of TV projects that received Criterion releases that were stuffed with classy extras. (I have the Small Axe box set.) Is there a TV project that you wish Criterion would add to the famous Criterion Closet?