I spent most of today watching HBO’s Treme, about a neighborhood in New Orleans, Louisiana, that takes place three months post-Katrina. I enjoyed it. When the show premiered, I couldn’t get into it. I kept asking my family and friends who were watching it at the time: is it good? is it like the Wire? They would roll their eyes at me and tell me to just watch it for myself, but yes, they liked it. I watched one episode and to me, it wasn’t The Wire in terms of quality, whatever that may be. Simply put: I wasn’t impressed with the first episode or the second so I quit.
I did have an lingering interest though, in the music and the culture of New Orleans and of course, what challenges the city faced after the cameras (media) left for good. How people there went about rebuilding their lives. New Orleans was out of sight and out of mind. When the media left, so went the coverage. I remember Anderson Cooper would sometimes do these re-caps to keep New Orleans in people’s minds but eventually that ceased.
I bought season 1 of Treme a few months back and sat down today and decided to watch it again and once I went past episode 3, that’s when I settled into watch it all. There are some things I could do without, but, the series is good overall, not great. Each and every episode is suffused with rich New Orleans music from some of the jazz greats that I’m not embarrassed to admit that I didn’t recognize at all. I did though recognize some songs.
Some of the characters stood out more than others as well as some threads. I didn’t know anything about the Mardi Gras Indians so that was new. As for human drama, the show delivers. There’s a thread throughout the series where a family hires a lawyer to find their brother who goes missing before the storm hit. They had evidence of his being locked up before Katrina but after, they hit a dead-end and what an uphill battle they faced with the court and the police to find him. There are other threads but if you’ve noticed, I’m not reviewing this series, just giving my thoughts on it. Anyway, I’m wrapping this up. Good show, great music and atmosphere. Now I have to wait for season two to become available during a re-broadcast before season three starts or wait for a DVD release. *sigh*
Interesting, I got about half way through episode two before lapsing into a coma…I had the series via our local version of netflix and the rest sat there for weeks before I finally decided I would rather watch paint dry than any more of the series. I just thought it was a bit ‘meh’ – like in trying to incorporate everything it didn’t really manage to stand out at all. I did like a couple of the characters but found some of them totally annoying…the radio DJ kid was one of those…and I love the music but frankly I’ve never been a big fan of mixing music with anything else (I hate musicals but love plays and concerts separately). Not sure I have it in me to give it another go.
Yes, the DJ kid got on my nerves. I could have done without the Mardi Gras Indian thread as well. The only things I really enjoyed were the music and the woman who tried to keep her restaurant afloat and the woman looking for her brother. The rest was meh. I don’t think you’ll like it a second time, Bernadette. Each and every episode had music in it, mainly following Wendell Pierce who played the trombone and went to all these different gigs. The name dropping of celebrities went a little overboard there as well. My post is generally positive but there def. were some negatives but I enjoyed the series overall.
Will probably give it a miss then…just play all the CDs I’ve collected during my two trips to New Orleans
I’ve been meaning to watch ‘Treme’, but I haven’t done so yet. I’m a bit leery of HBO after ‘Boardwalk Empire’, but then I remember ‘The Wire’.