By now, you either love/hate/or have never heard of HBO’s Treme, David Simon’s ode to post-Katrina New Orleans the way The Wire was his love-song to Baltimore. People that love the show are probably tired of defending it, and people that have never heard of it would probably hate it.
I started off thinking the show was misunderstood and underrated, but somewhere towards the end of the second season I really fell out of “like” with it. I grew tired of making excuses for this extremely indulgent show and its refusal to develop real plots and characters who evolve…or as Simon would now consider it, “Plebeian-stuff” that’s beneath him.
Is The Wire one of the greatest shows of all time? No question. But Treme isn’t, and isn’t even a good one at this point in time, and never really has been. [The fact that next season is its last and is only six episodes, makes me doubtful the show will ever be that good.] But whereas The Wire took a dumpy, third-rate city that no one had particular love for (Baltimore), and somehow made it riveting, Treme does the exact opposite.
And it makes me think that the reason The Wire was so exceptional was because Baltimore was a city that Simon could see clearly. He wasn’t interested in selling it as the “greatest city that ever existed,” and was comfortable exploring what was wrong with the city (drugs, crime, corruption, bureaucratic incompetence, failed institutions), otherwise known as everything we might find interesting about it.
In Treme, he goes waaaaay too far in the opposite direction, being so utterly and truly in love with New Orleans that it kind-of comes off like the young couple that just got married that you really can’t stand being around. You feel happy for their love, but how interesting is it to you as an outsider or observer? That’s almost exactly how I feel when “characters” sit around for thirty minutes jim-jawing about who’s the best trombonist in New Orleans or whether or not Fat Man Johnson is a better Tuba player than Crawdaddy Jones or some shit.
Much of the dialogue (about New Orleans food and music and even geography) is so inside baseball that it might as well have subtitles. It’s inaccessible, but, what’s worse, you get the feeling that Simon wants it that way. [The way some indie music lover’s actually hate it when their band gets popular.] The show feels like an endurance test to see exactly how much the audience can put up with (the third season’s plot-lines are identical to the second season’s, and the musical numbers are indistinguishable from one another) before they quit, and then, at that point, Simon can say “Oh well, they didn’t really get New Orleans anyway.”
Well I like the show’s plot-lines that deal with David Morse’s honest cop in a bad department or Jon Seda’s opportunistic contractor, but I can’t say it’s enough to get me to want to get Simon’s version of New Orleans. I’ll finish the show next year because I’ve made it this far, but it’s time for Simon to stop coasting on the love for The Wire, and make us really feel new love for something else. Grade for the season: C-…Grade for the Season Finale: C
Lol! I thought I was the only one. The first season was a good one, and I was expecting this to be another David Simon hit. It’s been kinda disappointing.
Oh Lola, you’re far from the only one. I would guess most people have never heard of this show, and quite a few that have might have quit watching a long time ago. Someone told me they forgot the show was still on.