Why Treme failed to live up to its promise

As a rabid fan of The Wire, I was careful to temper my expectations about Treme during its first season, and wound up concluding the following after faithfully covering the initial run of ten episodes:

I've been thinking about and struggling with what to say about Treme's first season finale for several days now. I love how Heather Havrilesky of Salon.com describes the show as "a four-hour lunch of a drama series if there ever was one," which sort of sums things up rather elegantly. And how do you "review" a four-hour lunch? A lot happened, it was sumptuous, it was rich, there was a great deal of chatter, and to be fair there were a few moments here and there when I wondered when the hell the check would arrive.

I will say this: Treme is a bold show in its own way, even experimental in its refusal to conform to traditional notions of plot and form. It's a show that could only have been produced on the shoulders of groundbreaking shows The Sopranos (which helped to change everything) and The Wire, and for those facts alone it deserves celebration.

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Now that we’re more than halfway through the second season, I’m forced to conclude that while there are still some good things going on (though not very many during the last several episodes, I must admit), Treme has failed to live up to its promise overall. To take the four-hour lunch metaphor to its logical next steps, I feel like I’m sitting alone at the restaurant, slightly hung over and pretty tired, increasingly bored and antsy waiting for my cab to arrive or, short of that, something remotely engaging to happen.

Here’s why:

No John Goodman
John Goodman as Creighton Bernette was a blustery and passionate force of nature in Season One, a perfect foil to Hurricane Katrina herself. Crying out in righteous indignation against the government for leaving a major American city stranded in the wake of the storm, he served as an ideal historian and grassroots activist for New Orleans and the messaging of the show. And let’s not forget that he was also entertaining as hell, railing against George W. Bush, FEMA, and others on YouTube and to anyone who would hear his fury.  

Creighton’s suicide, while a powerful symbol of the pain and devastation that the hurricane caused, greatly diminished the storytelling power of Treme thereafter.

No John Goodman is a big loss, for obvious reasons. He injected a bright spark of energy into every scene he was in and helped to balance out Antoine Batiste’s (Wendell Pierce) journey along with the many other working musicians who populate the show.

But I believe the nature of his suicide – we see him getting lonely and despondent for a few episodes, then he has a pleasant final tour of New Orleans before jumping off a ferry… without so much as a suicide note… and he’s a bloody writer – greatly diminished his character’s legacy as well. Here’s this larger than life figure railing against the hypocrisy of the government and the need for people to work together to fix the system, and he goes and offs himself, leaving a lovely wife and daughter to grieve for him in perpetuity? A major turnoff moment.

No momentum (or, everybody became boring)
Now that the short term impact of the storm has subsided and the characters get busy putting their lives back together, there has been a serious story momentum downgrade from first or second gear to something more akin to neutral. Ladonna’s rape and beating earlier this season was shocking and disturbing of course, but from a purely storytelling standpoint there was no real tension or intrigue built up around it (save to punctuate the theme of, “New Orleans was a dangerous place a year and a half after the storm.”)

Meanwhile, Antoine is getting his band together, Davis and Annie seem mostly happy (snoozeville for a drama – and I had great hope for these two), Sonny is trying to get his act together, Delmond is finding his roots musically and culturally, Lieutenant Colson stands around watching people, Hidalgo smarms around the political elite, and Janette hangs out with celebrity chefs in New York City (and Ziggy from The Wire Season Two). Am I missing anything? Because even writing that sentence caused me to yawn.

Ah, there’s Albert, played by the great Clarke Peters. It seems like David Simon and company don’t really know what to do with him this season. He’s kind of worn out, he kind of isn’t into being Big Chief anymore, he’s kind of getting closer with Delmond. It’s kind of boring, is what it is.

Long musical and party montages
During Treme’s pilot, there was a great and lengthy musical section that ended the hour, showing most of the main characters of the show gathering for a traditional New Orleans second line. It established the tone for the first season beautifully, capturing the uniquely laid back and celebratory culture of the city. Seven episodes into Season Two, when a band starts playing, I start wondering how long this particular interlude is going to last. Sure, there’s great jazz and brass band and other traditional musical stylings on display, but when the storytelling gear is stuck in neutral already, it makes me think about the next few e-mails I can knock out as opposed to the critical, what’s going to happen next?

Ditto for the party montages, which again were a lot more fun and engaging last season. This week’s “Carnival Time” covered Mardi Gras for the second time, and by the end of the episode I was seriously tempted to tip back a few cocktails to see if that would help put me more into the spirit of the party.

What’s it about again?
More than anything, Treme feels like a show that doesn’t really have a point anymore. Perhaps someone would counter-argue that, well, that’s the point. I don’t work that way. I need a beat and something to dance to, a hook of some kind of keep me interested as the story chugs along. Anyone who reads my dissertations here on TV Geek Army knows that that doesn’t mean I need a show to be as tidy and fast paced as a 24 or Law & Order. On the contrary, I deeply heart shows like Mad Men and Friday Night Lights that tell spellbinding stories at their own organic pace.

I’ll keep watching for the time being, if out of respect for David Simon and the good bits from the first season, but I’m fervently hoping that Treme gets into gear as the second season grinds to a close.