Suppose you live in New Orleans, which I do. Suppose that—partly as a result, admittedly—you cherish David Simon’s _Treme. _In that case, watching the show limp toward the exits this month without the culture at large particularly giving two hoots has a melancholy side and then some.
Remember, when it premiered in 2010, _Treme _was one heck of a gamble: Simon’s bid to create an even richer social, political, and human canvas than he had in _The Wire, _but minus the insurance of an inner-city cops-and-gangstas plotline to provide guaranteed focus and momentum. No less dicey, the series wasn’t just defiantly local-minded—in-jokes, cameos by everyone from music-scene fixture Kermit Ruffins to disgraced former City Councilman Oliver Thomas as themselves—but openly out to celebrate the uniqueness of New Orleans and the city’s survival/renewal after Katrina. The risk was that audiences not already sold on the place’s motley glories would feel excluded and ticked off about it instead of drawn in, fascinated, and vicariously welcomed.
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And it didn’t work. Not when it came to grabbing or retaining viewers, not when it came to the bagful-of-Emmys prestige or critical adulation HBO loves. My own early-bird take on the first season was definitely infatuated, but by season’s end, my then _GQ _colleague Sean Fennessey had penned an expert dismantling called “Why Treme Failed”—and note that past tense. Soon afterward, a phone chat with another pop-culture wallah who prides himself on keeping his ear to the ground—and who was genuinely nonplussed to hear I still liked the show—made it plain that Fennessey’s pan was already the conventional wisdom among TV eggheads. Having duly sampled _Treme, _because of David Simon, the brainy kids’ party bus was already on its way somewhere else.
We holdouts felt a mite forlorn. By the second season, viewership was down to around half a mil, pretty dismal even by boutique-TV standards—and it’s perfectly possible that around a third of that crowd lived within the city limits, or at least had once. The fact is, I don’t know a single person who stuck with _Treme _who wasn’t either a New Orleanian or else using the show for a long-distance New Orleans fix. HBO might very well not have okayed a third season, let alone the truncated (five episodes) fourth one now unspooling to cricket noises, if Simon weren’t someone they want to stay on good terms with down the road.
Source: https://t-tees.com
Category: WHY
