Treme - Season 2

Treme's second season expands on the scope of the show a bit while staying true to its roots, trying to show a complete picture of post-Katrina New Orleans and its many colorful inhabitants. The whole cast is back except for the ones who obviously wouldn't be, a couple characters get meatier roles (including David Morse as the cop friend of Melissa Leo's Toni, who deals most directly with the show's increased focus on crime), and Jon Seda from The Pacific shows up to kickstart a new plotline involving the city's attempt to rebuild and the seedy things that go into it.

If you didn't like the first season, you won't like the show now. It has the same natural feel, where characters go through their lives and something dramatic isn't really guaranteed to happen. There are a couple shocking moments beyond anything from the first season in keeping with the theme of crime returning to the city as it recovers, but they're rare and not what the show is about. There's also the same amount of extended scenes with live music, and if you don't like the kind of songs they play... well, it can be a hard show to watch. I do think there's enough variety of style that there's usually at least a couple songs I like per episode, though I occasionally wish they got less screen time, so the show would go by a bit quicker.

Being the second season, the show does branch out just a bit and have a few characters spend time away from the city. Del continues to hop back and forth between NO and New York, but this time his father comes along, and Janette is also in the city, with a story about being a cook there that feels mostly separate from the rest of the show but is still pretty interesting, even if you don't watch the Food Network. The writers also managed to miraculously save Sonny, having him clean his act up by working a fishing boat. I like the way the show avoids typical dramatic story beats with its characters, having developments that would usually go one way turn out another, more realistic and somehow more satisfying way. I won't go through every single character, but the show did a great job of continuing to intertwine all their lives, and the series is getting to the point where watching a new episode is like spending time with old friends and family. Treme will never be the amazing, game changing drama that The Wire was, but as a portrait of an interesting place tinged with political ideas without being overwhelmed by them, it is a very good show on its own. I look forward to season three.

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.

The Corner

Before The Wire, there was The Corner. In the 90s, David Simon and Ed Burns spent some time with real drug addicts from the slums of Baltimore and wrote a book about a particular family stuck there. It got turned into a miniseries on HBO directed by Charles S. Dutton, telling the true story more or less as it happened. It plays more or less like the drug scenes from The Wire, without the same focus on the more entertaining topics like the higher level drug dealing or investigations. It makes for a show that's more depressing and difficult to watch, and for the most part it's pretty powerful. The fact that these stories are actually real just makes it more affecting. It's not entirely mind numbing, because a few people actually do manage to straighten their lives out and at least stop using hardcore drugs, though others never manage the feat.

The six episode series ends with Dutton narrating the eventual fate of each significant character (at least up to that point in 2000), and it's sort of sobering how many of them end up dead. Fake interview segments with the different characters open and close each episode, though the final one instead interviews four of the actual survivors, getting their perspectives on what they hope the series can do for people. It's pretty sobering, eye-opening stuff, and it's just sad that things really don't seem to have changed that much in the worst parts of the country. As just a small window into what can really happen to anyone under the wrong circumstances, it's worth checking out if you don't have time for sixty hours of the best series ever, or want a little bit more.