Come Hell And High Water’ Netflix Series

EXCLUSIVE: By the end of the week, we could have our first Atlantic hurricane of 2025, as Tropical Storm Erin gathers strength. That could be an ominous sign for the hurricane season, but for destruction, death and ongoing impact, it would be hard to imagine eclipsing the tragedy of 2005.

That’s when Hurricane Katrina struck New Orleans, causing the levees to break and flood the city’s lower elevations, killing an estimated 1,200 people and irrevocably altering hundreds of thousands of lives. To mark the 20^th anniversary of that catastrophe, Netflix will premiere the three-part documentary series Katrina: Come Hell and High Water on August 27, from the team behind When the Levees Broke. Geeta Gandbhir, Samantha Knowles, and Spike Lee each direct one episode; Alisa Payne serves as showrunner and producer, and executive producers include Spike Lee, Sam Pollard, and Geeta Gandbhir.

Watch the series trailer above, featuring testimony of many who lived through the nightmare. “I woke up, my neighborhood had 20 feet of water,” actor and New Orleans native Wendell Pierce recalls in the trailer. Another survivor says, “I put my first granddaughter on the roof, turned around to get her two sisters and she fell into the water and disappeared.”

“20 years later,” the trailer notes, “this isn’t a retelling, it’s a reckoning.”

Adds a synopsis, “This is the story of a brutal coastal hurricane turned cataclysmic through human error and neglect. Over the course of a gripping and emotional three episodes, the people of New Orleans recount their past, extoll their present and lean into the future of what they and their beloved city survived and have become 20 years later. The series sets the stage for a tragedy – whose man-made elements expose the systemic governmental neglect that led to the city being defenseless in the face of the storm – and Katrina’s devastating impact that changed New Orleans irreparably. Detailed, harrowing and triumphant first-person accounts and never before seen archive illustrate the magnitude of Katrina, the aftermath of the levees breaking and the bungled recovery.”

Katrina: Come Hell and High Water is the first project for Message Pictures, the new production company formed by Geeta Gandbhir, Alisa Payne, and Sam Pollard. Their second project will be The Perfect Neighbor, acquired by Netflix out of Sundance where the film won the Directing Award for U.S. Documentary for Gandbhir.

The series does not shy away from examining the racial dimension of the disaster and its aftermath. “Our point of view is that, for a number of reasons, prior to Katrina, during Katrina in the immediate aftermath, and now 20 years later, systemic choices were made and continue to be made to isolate the people and take away their land,” showrunner-producer Alisa Payne observed. “New Orleans has this unique culture that everybody in America and all over the world goes to absorb because these people created it in this 80% Black city. But then they did not want to help them in the aftermath of Katrina because it was an 80% Black city. And so, as we move forward and we see all that is happening with climate change, like the fires in LA, if we don’t learn the lessons from Katrina, then the same thing will happen again.”

Payne added, “We really want to focus on the people and the community. That’s what makes what we call the melting pot that is America great. When we lose sight of people, everybody gets hurt. There’s all this talk about who deserves this and who deserves that now. But we all deserve to have the government work in our best interests. For that and for all the reasons that [director] Samantha [Knowles] said, this series is more timely than ever.”

Watch the trailer for Katrina: Come Hell and High Water above.