On Why People Should Be Watching The HBO Series Treme

(Note:  very minor spoilers for The Wire)

I haven't been in the mood lately to watch movies, but I have been taking in my usual complement of television shows.  One show that I have stuck by despite being alternately frustrated and bored with is David Simon's Treme.  And it has absolutely paid off in Season 3.  I feel comfortable saying that Treme is the best show on television right now, as it has no rival in storytelling scope.  Mad Men is an outstanding show, but it only covers a limited band of disaffected NYC oh-god-poor-me-i'm-too-rich-and-successful types.  At the fringes of Mad Men are other social classes, but the show revolves, for better or worse, around Don Draper.  This past season did an excellent job of widening the scope, but still, we're following mostly ad execs.  While Mad Men functions as a series of short stories that orbit Don Draper's world, Treme functions as a full novel of epic scope.  Its characters began largely apart and have begun to intersect, and this intersection is not forced - it comes out of who we know the characters to be.  David Simon and company have built a fully functional TV city in a way that I just can't imagine another show attempting.

Now one can imagine me writing the same post about The Wire in 2005, had I been visionary enough to watch that show while it was airing.  However, The Wire had something going for it that Treme absolutely does not:  cool. The criminal characters in The Wire were decidedly cool, and the show didn't baby us by defining their slang for us.  We sat as D'Angelo Barksdale's acolytes did, learning the drug trade at his knee like his teenage workers.  Assuming 'we' are not poor blacks, this brings a voyeuristic thrill - we could never be present for these conversations and never know this world.  The Wire trusted us to learn the drug world, it thought we were cool enough to get the lingo and be in on The Game.  We learned about large police investigations from McNulty and Rawls and all the rest in the same fashion.  Season 2 brought us the dockworkers, and many viewers did not like this season.  Why?  Because it wasn't cool.  It's just about a bunch of middle-class white people who are transitioning into being poor people.  Who wants to learn about a failing institution like the shipping trade when they can be seeing ultra-cool dudes like Stringer Bell explaining the drug trade via Adam Smith?  'Missteps' like this aside, fans stuck by the show (as they caught up with it on DVD), and by Season 5, David Simon and company had really begun to turn The Wire's Baltimore into a fully-fledged city - we saw the larger public institutions of the city (mayor's office, police department, school system) as well as private (longshoremen, newspaper) and how they were failing people.  We had done so through their day to day lives - sure there was significant drama, and people were murdered and went to prison and so forth.  But Simon and company never lost the sense that what people actually need to see are the parts around the drama - the waiting of being a police officer, the Fritos for breakfast diet of the urban poor, the sister's basement where salvation lies for a heroin addict.  And around it was the sharp dialogue, and characters that we simply had not seen on television - three-dimensional criminals, three-dimensional poor people - who talked to us like we were part of their world.

So coming off The Wire and the promises it had for the stubborn viewer, why did no one stick with Treme?  First, I have to take issue with the name, because you can't pronounce it correctly unless you've heard it or are from New Orleans.  It's already inside baseball, and it's part of where Treme fails - whereas characters on The Wire were cool and quotable, New Orleans is very much uncool.  It's a city of strange, old traditions and a language on its own.  Instead of slowly dipping us into this, the writing staff plunged us in head-first.  David Simon and company were no longer doing a show about Baltimore, a city he lived in and knew for decades.  To ward off charges of interlopery, Season 1 is packed to the gills with New Orleans local flavor and musician cameos, like a neon sign that says NEW ORLEANS IS DIFFERENT.  There's a scene where tourists are being taken through the Ninth Ward, New Orleans's most flooded district after Katrina.  The show wants us to believe that these tourists are scum of the earth, voyeurs of human suffering.  But how is this different than Treme itself?  It's a charge that dogged the show's first season.

Regardless, Treme could have been written as a novel, although who makes money doing that?  Instead, it's a television show, and it takes full advantage of something novels from Point Counter Point to Atlas Shrugged have struggled with - the depiction of music.  Music in novels is the most boring nonsense ever; if you were deaf and you only knew about music only from reading novels, you would wonder why anyone bothers with it.  Music in Treme is alive.  Mind you, I don't like New Orleans music.  At all.  The show has trotted out New Orleans musicians and called them magic - it just does nothing for me.  But I didn't have to like the music in Altman's Nashville to love Nashville.  And music binds the characters on the show together, it's not what everyone loves dearest, it's not a show exclusively about musicians, but it's what reminds everyone where their home is.  Simon and company have topped The Wire in terms of scope - I've never been to New Orleans, but I feel like it lives in this show.  I don't know how much the staff feels for New Orleans, but it comes across as loving.  I don't know if I'll ever visit New Orleans, but thanks to Treme, I can love it safely from afar.  I can dislike its music and think that the traditions are not for me, but watching the characters participate in them gives me joy unlike anything I've seen on TV to date.  Most of the best TV is about how alone you, the viewer, truly are, featuring protagonists that seem totally fine with loneliness - Treme is about the opposite.

Treme is ending soon - there's going to be a 5 episode 4th season and that's it.  In total, there will be 36 episodes of the show.  It will never be beloved like The Wire - no one will make brackets of their favorite Treme characters.  Maybe instead of discovering it a year after it had ended, people will discover Treme 5 or 10 years after its conclusion.  I fear, however, that it will be lost in the face of more dramatic and bombastic shows.  People say they love this new era of serialized television, but Treme proves they don't love it if it's not cool.