As one of the first fans of HBO’s cult hit The Wire–I watched the first season on HBO before the show became a smash on DVD–I could not have been looking more forward to Wire creator David Simon’s followup Treme. I was hoping he would do for the South what he did for Baltimore: a complex, all encompassing look at how things got so fucked up.
But season 1 of Treme didn’t deliver that…at all. It had characters that practically double dared us to like them, story lines that kept us at arm’s length, pacing that was monstrously indulgent on the part of Simon (sensing he could do no wrong after The Wire), and the show had an almost obsessive compulsive detail to jazz and New Orleans music. The majority of the characters in season 1 were somehow involved in music, forgetting that there is, you know, an entire city trying to deal with the hurricane that might have been interesting to hear from.
For the most part season 2 has fixed those problems. They’ve added some non-musician characters to the cast by making David Morse’s soulful cop a series regular, and wrote a new character in Jon Seda’s shady, Republican contractor, trying to make a fortune by milking funds that should go to the relief effort. Each episode still treats jazz as the be all and end all, but they don’t spend whole twenty minute sections debating a bunch of jazz players we’ve never heard of. Best of all, they’ve allowed more story lines outside New Orleans’s musical world by focusing on the crime wave (both violent and white collar) that pillaged the city’s attempt at recovery.
Supporting Scene Stealer: Although I like the energy Jon Seda’s double dealing contractor brings to each scene, it’s David Morse that steals each scene he’s in with patient wisdom. From the season 1 holdovers, Steve Zahn’s Davis has grown more likable and Clarke Peters’s stubbornly proud working class hero is a powerful portrait of a strong, decent man being beat down by a heartless system. John Steinback had written a novel about post-Katrina New Orleans, Peters’s Albert Lambeau would be the protagonist of it.