Treme: "Shallow Water, Oh Mama": Davis can save us

Quick Take: Treme, "Shallow Water, Oh Mama"
"I'm not trying to be the spokesman for the city. New Orleans speaks for itself." - Creighton

Review: Treme, "Shallow Water, Oh Mama"
(S0106) I watched this episode on Sunday night, and have spent a lot of time thinking about it since. It was entertaining and interesting and certainly watchable in many ways (the music and colors and sounds and accents of New Orleans are worth the price of admission alone, in my book), but I found myself… well, not worried, but a little concerned for the first time.

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Concerned – and this took me some time to get to – because I'm starting to get that "I hope this is going somewhere" feeling. Now, I'm nowhere close to one of the Friday Night Lights "group chat" writers on Slate who called the show "tedious," and I certainly am finding the journey rewarding to an extent in of itself, but some of the storylines are drag-ier than others. Maybe they'll get less draggy over time? I totally am open to that option. But concerned? Yeah, a bit.

I then got to the next place where I'm going to theorize a little bit. The characters I enjoy best on the show – Antoine Batiste, Janette, Annie – are the ones who aren't a proxy for some kind of CAUSE. Antoine is the most fun to watch of all (I theorized last week that he's roughly the McNulty of the bunch, full of life and flaws and passions aplenty), and it's a lot to do with how great Wendell Pierce is as an actor and a lot to do with the fact that here's a cool and charismatic and eccentric trumpet player finding his stumbling way in the chaotic upheaval of post-Katrina New Orleans. Likewise, Janette (Kim Dickens) grows on me each week because I'm drawn into the world of her struggling French restaurant (Desautel's), a joint I would gladly eat at twice a day for life (if it had wifi, granted) just on looks and atmosphere alone. And poor, sweet Annie (Lucia Micarelli) is fascinating because she's lovely and bright and talented and attached at the hip to a loser druggie musician boyfriend (Sonny, played finely by Michiel Huisman), and I'm hoping like hell that she gets the hell away from him.

The characters and storylines I'm enjoying less, on the other hand, tend to be the ones that are SAYING SOMETHING, at times a little too loudly for my taste. I like Steve Zahn as Davis McAlery more than many others, but his transition from stoner who fires off inspired ass clown rants at the bar to half-joke, half-satire candidate for City Council is getting a little iffy. I also think that John Goodman is doing a bang up job as Creighton Bernette, some of the strongest work of his career, and a lot of his spirited defense of New Orleans is fiery and fun, it runs right up to the line of getting in-your-face, too. Same goes for Albert Lambreaux, played by the off-the-charts great Clarke Peters, with his weary campaign to get his crew to find places to stay in the projects.

Finally, there's a group of storylines that I don't really connect with, Delmond's (Rob Brown) chief among them. When Delmond comes on screen and whines yet again about not feeling the New Orleans vibe, I feel like we're watching a one-dimensional one act play called The Long Road Home, with the eventual upshot that Delmond is going to rediscover his roots while sharing the great legacy of New Orleans with all of us. And we see a hint of that this week as Delmond stops by Albert/Big Chief's rehearsal/jam session.

Hypercritical, am I? Yeah, I think I am in the way that you get with a show that is obviously of an extremely high quality from the jump and has enormous potential. It's a show that invites conversation, and that indeed part of the show's mission statement is to raise social consciousness about New Orleans and the plight of working people in cities (see: The Wire and Baltimore).

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Video: Treme, "Shallow Water, Oh Mama"
Here's the preview, from HBO:

Recap: Treme, "Shallow Water, Oh Mama"
Davis raises his profile on the streets and on TV; Delmond tours while Antoine toils.

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