Treme - Season 1

If you go in to Treme comparing it to David Simon's last series, The Wire, you're probably going to be disappointed. Not through any fault of the show's, but through impossible expectations. By the end of the season, I was fully prepared to call Treme a great drama, it's just not great on the easily-the-best-thing-on-TV-right-now level of The Wire. It's less centrally focused, feeling more like several narrow stories of living in post-Katrina New Orleans that happen to frequently connect and intertwine rather than a vast overview of the whole city. The many different main characters cover a lot of ground, depicting all sorts of situations and showing as many sides and points of view as they can. Sometimes I felt like the show was preaching at me a bit too much about the whole situation, but Simon has made it his business to expose the truth about things with his projects and it has resulted in shows worth watching for more than their entertainment value. Taking place in New Orleans, there's obviously a lot of music, and it's handled quite well, whether its classic stuff being played in the background or something original being played right on camera by the cast, which frequently features real-life musicians. Music is one of the show's strongest elements, with practically every song effectively conveying the mood and also tending to be genuinely enjoyably performed.

The show lives or dies on its characters, and most of them are good ones. John Goodman guest starred all season long, being the most directly political character and frequently entertaining in his rantings. He also played heavily into the moment where the show went from good political commentary to a legitimately brilliant TV show, so it's a character I'll remember for a while. Steve Zahn plays a DJ/aspiring musician/political revolutionary, and his story tended to be the series' comic relief while still having things to say, and it's another performance I quite enjoyed. Several of the main characters are played by veterans of Simons' other HBO shows, and they cement themselves into the roles well, amazingly avoiding the common fate of Wire actors where I can't see anyone from that show without thinking about it. Wendell Pierce plays a trombone player who lives day to day off any gigs he can get, and is another source of levity on a show that could have easily gotten overbearing. Khandi Alexander is his ex-wife, a bar owner looking for her missing brother and frequently featuring one of the best "Are you shitting me?" faces in history. Clarke Peters plays a Mardi Gras Indian chief who tries to keep his tribe together after the storm and also ends up having some run-ins with the law. He's basically the opposite of the kindly Freamon from The Wire, intimidating in his unerring dedication to his beliefs.

The season finale surprised me by featuring a glimpse of the past, showing a little bit of what the various characters were going through on the day of the storm. It was a powerful eight minutes or so, really putting you into what it's like to live somewhere where true disaster is never that far away. It left me truly wanting the next season to begin as soon as possible instead of just fondly anticipating it, and was a great way to help bring the show's first year to a close. HBO's been a bit on the weak side since some of its best series ended, but with Treme's success, True Blood continuing to evolve into something genuinely entertaining, and stuff like Boardwalk Empire and Game of Thrones on the horizon, it might not be long before it's unequivocally on top again.