David Mills, an Emmy-winning writer and producer who worked on acclaimed shows including NYPD Blue, Homicide: Life on the Street, The Corner and The Wire, died yesterday at age 48, of a brain aneurysm. His death comes less than two weeks before his newest series—Treme, co-created by his longtime colleague and friend David Simon—premieres on HBO. In addition to these series, Mills created the mob drama Kingpin for NBC, wrote the incisive pop-culture blog Undercover Black Man and was a reporter for The Washington Post, perhaps best known for his controversial 1992 interview with Sister Souljah of Public Enemy.

Critic Alan Sepinwall, a personal friend of Mills’, posted a lovely remembrance at his blog today. I just saw Mills a few weeks ago in New Orleans, visiting the set of Treme, an excellent new series for which he wrote some episodes and was a co-executive producer. The scene they were shooting that day, ironically, was a jazz funeral, in a cemetery in Gretna. There are several such funerals over the course of Treme’s first season, and Mills had a perceptive, and now poignant, insight on the role of the jazz funeral–starting with a mournful procession, ending with a celebratory “cakewalk” by the brass band–in Treme’s narrative structure and in New Orleans culture: