Simon brought us The Corner and The Wire, the latter being television's most perfect dramatic series -- ever. The Corner was almost as good, each drawing from Simon's time as a beat reporter in Baltimore.
Treme ain't The Corner, and Treme ain't The Wire.
Both of those shows hooked me immediately. The characters were flesh-and-blood, full-bodied people with stories that seemed to matter.
Don't get me wrong: Some of Treme is good. Khandi Alexander (The Corner) is excellent as the bar owner Ladonna Batiste-Williams; same goes for Rob Brown (The Express, Stop-Loss) who plays Delmond Lambreaux, a trumpet player who returns to New Orleans only because his father (a somewhat disappointing Clarke Peters from The Wire) is a loon who's so hell bent on relaunching his defunct Mardi Gras troop he's living in a run-down building that he doesn't own.
I still don't know what to make of Treme. The storylines are connected only by the location. And while I don't think a show based in post-Katrina New Orleans is an impossibility, I think the idea needs to be secondary to the story, to the lives of the people being brought to screen.
Take, for example, Mad Men. The setting is interesting - ad agency in 1960s America. But the show's life-blood are those fractured relationships and raw emotions.
More can be said about this, but I'll leave it there. I'm hoping things start to come together in the next couple of episodes.
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2 comments:
I completely agree. So far, the connections are loose and frankly there's no storyline. It's boring. There are some visually interesting elements and great music and the idea/potential for something, but it hasn't come together yet.
There are some smart writers on this show, and David Simon has only given us quality TV thus far... I'll check it out Sunday. If the connections don't seem clear by the end of episode three, I may just give it up.
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