Aired 2010 to 2013 (4 seasons) on HBO
Created by David Simon and Eric Overmyer
Currently streaming on HBO
For a brief introduction to this countdown, click here.
Treme is a moving story about a sprawling cast of New Orleans residents trying to rebuild their lives in the wake of Katrina. It is an essential statement on both the promise and failures of America and it earns that praise on its own merit. That said, Treme never received the same level of attention or presumption of greatness showered upon David Simon's other work. It's only logical then, if also a bit ironic, that the best way for me to praise Treme is to highlight its similarity (and sometimes, superiority) to these other series.
It's All in The Game
Let's start in the obvious place: Simon's magnum opus The Wire. Its portrayal of systemic dysfunction and its effect on humanity encompassing every level of a semi-fictional Baltimore was underappreciated in its time, but has come to be known as one of the pillars of the "Golden Age of TV." There's a lot of reasons for this, the most critical of which is the way it gradually looped in every bit of civic life into its narrative. The Wire is great in part because it leaves no stone unturned in depicting the decay at the heart of our communities (to quote the great Lester Freamon, "all the pieces matter").
With Treme, Simon and crew seem to realize that they can't (and shouldn't) try to replicate this exact formula. The Wire drops us into a relatively "normal" urban situation and uses that to tell more generalized stories about society, whereas Treme is the story of a very specific place and time. Treme does cover some of the same matters when relevant (police corruption, bloodthirsty developers, etc.) but grounds itself first and foremost in the personal desires and conflicts of its characters. This style of storytelling allows the show to cover more ground without getting bogged down in too many details. For example, we don't really get a full look into the deterioration of New Orleans' schools, but Antoine's stint as a music teacher gives us enough to get the gist. As Treme is a show that successfully balances between big and small storytelling, this sort of approach is crucial to its success.
The most illuminating contrast between the two series, however, is the subtle differences in the way the shows use violence as a thematic element. To be clear, neither show is violent in the way we typically think of American entertainment - there are few if any gratuitous depictions of death or other violent crime. But whereas violence is an ever-present threat in The Wire (even though it flips the cliche on its side, it is fundamentally a cops-and-robbers show), the majority of violence in Treme simmers just beneath the surface, waiting to lash out in the rare but impactful moments. Moreover, Treme makes it a point to ruminate on the more subtle and systemic forms of violence that are often unremarked upon. Big Chief suffers from COPD and cancer, likely as a result of poor working conditions, both pre- and post-Katrina. The NOPD works to close ranks and threaten Toni and Terry as they work to uncover evidence of horrible abuses of power following the storm. And the larger collapse of civic life leads to skyrocketing violent crime rates, which claim multiple victims from the show's cast of characters. This all serves to underline a central tenet of Simon's work - when the institutions we depend on fail, it affects us all in ways far more profound than we often perceive.
TV is Supposed to Be Enjoyable
The simplest case for Treme's greatness is its superiority to the currently-running series, The Deuce. That show focuses on the changing world of sex work and other late-night industries in 1970s New York. The Deuce invokes a natural comparison as the two seasons that have aired are the most structurally similar to Treme of anything within the Simon oeuvre. Both series feature season-long story arcs (of course), although none are as all-encompassing and self-contained like the investigations of The Wire. Certain plots do resolve within a single season, but the majority of stories are effectively series-long journeys. In Treme, virtually every character has a primary focus that permeates every season, such as Davis' musical exploits, Toni's investigations, and Janette's culinary career. And with The Deuce we focus on Candy's dream of becoming a director and Vince's futile attempts to carve out a straightforward and non-corrupt life. The upshot of this slice-of-life storytelling style is that it leaves room to spend time with the characters actually enjoying themselves and living their lives. This in turn creates a sense of place and specificity that's hard to accomplish otherwise.
So what's the key difference between the two? In a word, density. Treme has roughly a dozen main characters and many of their storylines overlap, which leaves plenty of time for the lengthy musical numbers and other such diversions. These interludes allow for the narrative to breathe and help the viewer take in the culture and people that make this barely-fictionalized version of New Orleans a city worth saving. The Deuce takes this basic formula, but essentially replaces the music with extra plot lines and characters. This leads to an unwieldy amount of story that, at least in the more transitory episodes, feels more like homework than entertainment. This doesn't mean The Deuce is a bad show. Instead, its failures illustrate just how hard it is to make this storytelling dynamic work to achieve a greater purpose.
What Treme Misses (And Why That's Probably Fine)
The previous comparisons are all good and valid, but I've saved the best and most revealing for last. Treme is set in the aftermath of a specific historical event, so it only makes sense that the most meaningful parallel would do the same. In this case I'm talking about Show Me a Hero, the 2015 miniseries about federally-mandated housing integration in late-80s Yonkers, New York. Like Treme, the series features a larger struggle for justice amidst a climate of both passive indifference and outright malice. And the two series feature characters with strikingly similar purposes: Toni's advocacy for victim's of police violence in Treme is not dissimilar from Mayor Wasickso's (played by Oscar Isaac, btw) effort to build public housing.
But there's a crucial difference. Show Me a Hero builds to its climax by spending some of its time with characters living in poverty who end up as participants in the housing lottery in the series' final hour. This serves to not only put a human face on the still-existing problem of housing scarcity, but also underline the inadequacy of these half-measures when some of the characters don't hear their number called. Treme...does not do this. We get occasional glimpses into the lives of the poor, but all the main characters are comfortable enough. Many are well-to-do or building successful careers while others are at least supported by rich family members. The only semi-poor character is Sonny, and he is 1) is a while male, and 2) at least for the first season or two, an asshole. And even he finds his way towards stability and prosperity relatively quickly!
Ultimately I don't think this is a flaw. And upon reflecting on why exactly the show wouldn't need to feature an in-depth examination of extreme poverty, I actually think it's illuminating in ways both intended and unintended. The most obvious point is that for all its clout, HBO is still a boutique network largely aimed at bourgeois liberals. Even though this implicit bias isn't generally a feature of Simon's work, he's not above occasionally succumbing to it. Another thing to remember is that the show is not as singularly focused on systemic failure as Simon's other works. The creative process and its relationship to local culture is just as much a primary theme of the show, and it would be nearly impossible to construct this dual narrative if the characters were always struggling to get by.
All that said, the most critical implication of the minimization of poverty in Treme is shockingly simple - the city-wide calamity of Katrina led to a disproportionately high rate of displacement for poor residents. From a working paper on the matter:
"Although we would expect poorer New Orleanians to have stayed closer to the city to minimize travel costs and because they lacked cars, limited evidence suggests that many may instead have been forced to move further away from the city. Poor families may also have faced challenges in reestablishing connections with displaced friends and neighbors because they could not afford the cost of traveling back to the city regularly or at all. Another issue is that concentrated poverty neighborhoods in New Orleans are unattractive places to which to return, particularly for many poor people who experienced better neighborhood environments, job opportunities, schools, and amenities in their new locations. A final issue is that low rates of homeownership place a significant barrier for residents to return to the city because of the difficulty of finding rental housing in New Orleans."
Simply put, those living in poverty were largely relegated elsewhere after the storm. While we do see evidence of this in Treme, it's mostly relegated to the margins. Indeed, much of the plotting that touches on this involves the absent poor (ie. Nelson's group buying up vacant homes), which tells the story of modern New Orleans as well as anything else.
This isn't to say you should automatically give the show credit for something it actively didn't do. But when you consider the entirety of the effect of Katrina and the insufficient response from the government, it's hard not to feel that Treme did a superlative job of conveying it as well as one can through art. Watch the show, read this post-Katrina research, and try to tell me that the show didn't capture a shockingly high percentage of everything to do with that era of New Orleans in at least some small way. And because of the way it was told, it's clearly more entertaining and engaging than simply reading survey results. Some critical aspects of the tragedy were made explicit and others less so, but it's clear that Simon and crew can be trusted to lend a human touch to a story of the very limitations of humanity. And in that regards, Treme is one of his teams' finest works.
Created by David Simon and Eric Overmyer
Currently streaming on HBO
For a brief introduction to this countdown, click here.
Treme is a moving story about a sprawling cast of New Orleans residents trying to rebuild their lives in the wake of Katrina. It is an essential statement on both the promise and failures of America and it earns that praise on its own merit. That said, Treme never received the same level of attention or presumption of greatness showered upon David Simon's other work. It's only logical then, if also a bit ironic, that the best way for me to praise Treme is to highlight its similarity (and sometimes, superiority) to these other series.
It's All in The Game
Let's start in the obvious place: Simon's magnum opus The Wire. Its portrayal of systemic dysfunction and its effect on humanity encompassing every level of a semi-fictional Baltimore was underappreciated in its time, but has come to be known as one of the pillars of the "Golden Age of TV." There's a lot of reasons for this, the most critical of which is the way it gradually looped in every bit of civic life into its narrative. The Wire is great in part because it leaves no stone unturned in depicting the decay at the heart of our communities (to quote the great Lester Freamon, "all the pieces matter").
With Treme, Simon and crew seem to realize that they can't (and shouldn't) try to replicate this exact formula. The Wire drops us into a relatively "normal" urban situation and uses that to tell more generalized stories about society, whereas Treme is the story of a very specific place and time. Treme does cover some of the same matters when relevant (police corruption, bloodthirsty developers, etc.) but grounds itself first and foremost in the personal desires and conflicts of its characters. This style of storytelling allows the show to cover more ground without getting bogged down in too many details. For example, we don't really get a full look into the deterioration of New Orleans' schools, but Antoine's stint as a music teacher gives us enough to get the gist. As Treme is a show that successfully balances between big and small storytelling, this sort of approach is crucial to its success.
The most illuminating contrast between the two series, however, is the subtle differences in the way the shows use violence as a thematic element. To be clear, neither show is violent in the way we typically think of American entertainment - there are few if any gratuitous depictions of death or other violent crime. But whereas violence is an ever-present threat in The Wire (even though it flips the cliche on its side, it is fundamentally a cops-and-robbers show), the majority of violence in Treme simmers just beneath the surface, waiting to lash out in the rare but impactful moments. Moreover, Treme makes it a point to ruminate on the more subtle and systemic forms of violence that are often unremarked upon. Big Chief suffers from COPD and cancer, likely as a result of poor working conditions, both pre- and post-Katrina. The NOPD works to close ranks and threaten Toni and Terry as they work to uncover evidence of horrible abuses of power following the storm. And the larger collapse of civic life leads to skyrocketing violent crime rates, which claim multiple victims from the show's cast of characters. This all serves to underline a central tenet of Simon's work - when the institutions we depend on fail, it affects us all in ways far more profound than we often perceive.
TV is Supposed to Be Enjoyable
The simplest case for Treme's greatness is its superiority to the currently-running series, The Deuce. That show focuses on the changing world of sex work and other late-night industries in 1970s New York. The Deuce invokes a natural comparison as the two seasons that have aired are the most structurally similar to Treme of anything within the Simon oeuvre. Both series feature season-long story arcs (of course), although none are as all-encompassing and self-contained like the investigations of The Wire. Certain plots do resolve within a single season, but the majority of stories are effectively series-long journeys. In Treme, virtually every character has a primary focus that permeates every season, such as Davis' musical exploits, Toni's investigations, and Janette's culinary career. And with The Deuce we focus on Candy's dream of becoming a director and Vince's futile attempts to carve out a straightforward and non-corrupt life. The upshot of this slice-of-life storytelling style is that it leaves room to spend time with the characters actually enjoying themselves and living their lives. This in turn creates a sense of place and specificity that's hard to accomplish otherwise.
So what's the key difference between the two? In a word, density. Treme has roughly a dozen main characters and many of their storylines overlap, which leaves plenty of time for the lengthy musical numbers and other such diversions. These interludes allow for the narrative to breathe and help the viewer take in the culture and people that make this barely-fictionalized version of New Orleans a city worth saving. The Deuce takes this basic formula, but essentially replaces the music with extra plot lines and characters. This leads to an unwieldy amount of story that, at least in the more transitory episodes, feels more like homework than entertainment. This doesn't mean The Deuce is a bad show. Instead, its failures illustrate just how hard it is to make this storytelling dynamic work to achieve a greater purpose.
What Treme Misses (And Why That's Probably Fine)
The previous comparisons are all good and valid, but I've saved the best and most revealing for last. Treme is set in the aftermath of a specific historical event, so it only makes sense that the most meaningful parallel would do the same. In this case I'm talking about Show Me a Hero, the 2015 miniseries about federally-mandated housing integration in late-80s Yonkers, New York. Like Treme, the series features a larger struggle for justice amidst a climate of both passive indifference and outright malice. And the two series feature characters with strikingly similar purposes: Toni's advocacy for victim's of police violence in Treme is not dissimilar from Mayor Wasickso's (played by Oscar Isaac, btw) effort to build public housing.
But there's a crucial difference. Show Me a Hero builds to its climax by spending some of its time with characters living in poverty who end up as participants in the housing lottery in the series' final hour. This serves to not only put a human face on the still-existing problem of housing scarcity, but also underline the inadequacy of these half-measures when some of the characters don't hear their number called. Treme...does not do this. We get occasional glimpses into the lives of the poor, but all the main characters are comfortable enough. Many are well-to-do or building successful careers while others are at least supported by rich family members. The only semi-poor character is Sonny, and he is 1) is a while male, and 2) at least for the first season or two, an asshole. And even he finds his way towards stability and prosperity relatively quickly!
Ultimately I don't think this is a flaw. And upon reflecting on why exactly the show wouldn't need to feature an in-depth examination of extreme poverty, I actually think it's illuminating in ways both intended and unintended. The most obvious point is that for all its clout, HBO is still a boutique network largely aimed at bourgeois liberals. Even though this implicit bias isn't generally a feature of Simon's work, he's not above occasionally succumbing to it. Another thing to remember is that the show is not as singularly focused on systemic failure as Simon's other works. The creative process and its relationship to local culture is just as much a primary theme of the show, and it would be nearly impossible to construct this dual narrative if the characters were always struggling to get by.
All that said, the most critical implication of the minimization of poverty in Treme is shockingly simple - the city-wide calamity of Katrina led to a disproportionately high rate of displacement for poor residents. From a working paper on the matter:
"Although we would expect poorer New Orleanians to have stayed closer to the city to minimize travel costs and because they lacked cars, limited evidence suggests that many may instead have been forced to move further away from the city. Poor families may also have faced challenges in reestablishing connections with displaced friends and neighbors because they could not afford the cost of traveling back to the city regularly or at all. Another issue is that concentrated poverty neighborhoods in New Orleans are unattractive places to which to return, particularly for many poor people who experienced better neighborhood environments, job opportunities, schools, and amenities in their new locations. A final issue is that low rates of homeownership place a significant barrier for residents to return to the city because of the difficulty of finding rental housing in New Orleans."
Simply put, those living in poverty were largely relegated elsewhere after the storm. While we do see evidence of this in Treme, it's mostly relegated to the margins. Indeed, much of the plotting that touches on this involves the absent poor (ie. Nelson's group buying up vacant homes), which tells the story of modern New Orleans as well as anything else.
This isn't to say you should automatically give the show credit for something it actively didn't do. But when you consider the entirety of the effect of Katrina and the insufficient response from the government, it's hard not to feel that Treme did a superlative job of conveying it as well as one can through art. Watch the show, read this post-Katrina research, and try to tell me that the show didn't capture a shockingly high percentage of everything to do with that era of New Orleans in at least some small way. And because of the way it was told, it's clearly more entertaining and engaging than simply reading survey results. Some critical aspects of the tragedy were made explicit and others less so, but it's clear that Simon and crew can be trusted to lend a human touch to a story of the very limitations of humanity. And in that regards, Treme is one of his teams' finest works.
