Treme: The Complete First Season

Produced by David Simon and Eric Overmyer

The Wire has basically ruined all television for me, so I felt a great deal of relief to learn that David Simon's new HBO series, Treme, was finally being released on DVD (I don't get HBO Canada, and something like this is too good to stream on-line).

Treme explores New Orleans in the months following Hurricane Katrina.  It follows a group of characters as they try to rebuild their lives and their city.  As with Baltimore in The Wire, the city of New Orleans is the main character, and the ten episodes that make up the first season comprise a long love letter to the place.

Comparisons to The Wire are easy to make throughout this review, especially since the shows share actors as well as an aesthetic sensibility and a commitment to novelistic storytelling, but this is a show that deserves to be judged on its own merits.  Over the course of the show, a number of social and political issues are addressed, and a broad cross-section of the city's racial and class-based sub-groupings are portrayed and given space to shine.

We follow along as these characters go through the pain of losing their homes, their loved ones, their way of life, and in some cases, their dignity.  The subtitle for the season is "Won't Bow Don't Know How", and that ethic is evident in scene after scene, as people face their problems with stoicism and humour.

There are a number of strong performances, mostly by actors recognizable to anyone who has watched Simon's other shows.  Clarke Peters (Freamon on The Wire) plays Albert Lambreaux, a politically active Big Chief of a New Orleans Indian tribe.  Wendell Pierce (Bunk on The Wire) plays a down and out trombone player.  Khandi Alexander (who was the absolute best part of The Corner) plays his ex-wife, who is trying to locate her brother, who has been missing since the storm.  Her lawyer is played by Melissa Leo, who I loved in the earlier seasons of Homicide: Life on the Street.

New to the troupe are John Goodman, Steve Zahn, Kim Dickens, and Lucia Micarelli, who plays a street fiddler.  That brings me to the music, which is as big a character on this show as is the city.  Each episode is infused with a variety of musical pieces, and a lot of screen time is given to the performance of different brass bands in clubs and on the street during the famous Second Line parades.  There is a plethora of local musicians and artists featured here, making this one of the best-sounding tv shows I've ever seen.

I'm a little surprised to see that the show is returning in another couple of weeks for a second season.  This is good news, but I feel as if there is no need to return to these characters - the first season tells their stories completely, and ends just like a good novel does, leaving you wanting to know more about those characters, but also giving you a sense of closure.  Of course, when people like David Simon are in charge of setting the tone for the next chapter, I don't mind if the show runs forever.