Desert-Loving Englishmen
Treme - Season 1 (2010)
rating: 1 out of 5 cravats
on HBO in Oxford
New Orleans deserves a great show, and it is tempting to say that simply by being a show about New Orleans, Treme is enough. But that’s a laughable idea, and Treme is terrible. The Wire, of course, was less about Baltimore than the more general modern American city; Maryland just happened to be the place that David Simon and Ed Burns knew. At some point Simon visited Louisiana, maybe before Hurricane Katrina, maybe after, and to give him the best possible benefit of the doubt, he decided to make a show that re-focused the country’s attention on what went wrong there.
But if Treme is the best that Simon the Tourist can do, it’s a pretty poor showing. The Onion headline about the nation’s crumbling infrastructure being “probably some sort of metaphor” says “help” more sweetly than this broad, almost shapeless character study that reduces New Orleans to something so close to stereotype that it’s shocking. At the very least it’s disappointing. I could go on, but criticizing the musical choices themselves (Steve Zahn is the only character who listens to hip-hop?), or the guest appearances by “real life” Southerners, or 90% of the words out of men’s and women’s mouths, misses my point more than makes it.
It’s funny; people want to like Treme. From conversations and word of mouth, it seems to me that the show arrived this spring with an inordinate amount of goodwill for its future. And there are moments when characters deal with loss that are touching and restrained. I guess it’s hard not to be moved by a funeral procession given enough time to run its full course over several lovely minutes on screen, but to cut from that to a Steve Earle original that he composes on camera as part of a plot point is sad. When it isn’t scenes of black cultural traditions that Simon can’t take credit for, Treme is a petulant upper middle-class white man complaining about neglect – always his own. Surely when HBO gets off its high horse and cancels the show, Simon will find something better to do than join the chorus.
rating: 1 out of 5 cravats
on HBO in Oxford
New Orleans deserves a great show, and it is tempting to say that simply by being a show about New Orleans, Treme is enough. But that’s a laughable idea, and Treme is terrible. The Wire, of course, was less about Baltimore than the more general modern American city; Maryland just happened to be the place that David Simon and Ed Burns knew. At some point Simon visited Louisiana, maybe before Hurricane Katrina, maybe after, and to give him the best possible benefit of the doubt, he decided to make a show that re-focused the country’s attention on what went wrong there.
But if Treme is the best that Simon the Tourist can do, it’s a pretty poor showing. The Onion headline about the nation’s crumbling infrastructure being “probably some sort of metaphor” says “help” more sweetly than this broad, almost shapeless character study that reduces New Orleans to something so close to stereotype that it’s shocking. At the very least it’s disappointing. I could go on, but criticizing the musical choices themselves (Steve Zahn is the only character who listens to hip-hop?), or the guest appearances by “real life” Southerners, or 90% of the words out of men’s and women’s mouths, misses my point more than makes it.
It’s funny; people want to like Treme. From conversations and word of mouth, it seems to me that the show arrived this spring with an inordinate amount of goodwill for its future. And there are moments when characters deal with loss that are touching and restrained. I guess it’s hard not to be moved by a funeral procession given enough time to run its full course over several lovely minutes on screen, but to cut from that to a Steve Earle original that he composes on camera as part of a plot point is sad. When it isn’t scenes of black cultural traditions that Simon can’t take credit for, Treme is a petulant upper middle-class white man complaining about neglect – always his own. Surely when HBO gets off its high horse and cancels the show, Simon will find something better to do than join the chorus.
posted by NPK at 8:56 AM
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