I think I know how prepubescent/teenage girls feel now. In the past I’ve never understood how the fairer sex could go mad with excitement over their pop/movie star icons, whilst remaining resolutely saner and less compulsive than men for the rest of the time. Growing up as a teenage male, I didn’t really get what the girls wanted their idols to do to them. I didn’t think it was enough for them just to be near; to flash them a passing smile and occasionally release a new album. I think I’m coming around to appreciating that feeling as my anticipation for new HBO series Treme builds to a fever pitch.
Treme (pronounced trih-MAY) is the brainchild of David Simon, who created the Best TV Show Ever™ The Wire. Anyone who disputes that is just doing so to contradict empirically demonstrable fact. Or an alien being with a penchant for space shows dealing with space issues.Or a writer for The Sopranos.
But Treme is not The Wire. Although there are similarities in the density and complexity of the characters, this is a show driven by music rather than drugs and violence, and it leaves behind the fading urban landscape of Baltimore in favour of post-Katrina New Orleans; a beautiful, vibrant city that is as much divided by race and income by any other major US settlement.
It’s clear that Treme is more likely to get a mainstream audience than The Wire, which may have got the world’s press begging for more, but failed to perform as well internationally as other HBO series. Part of Treme’s success could be down to the casting of established stars like John Goodman and Steve Zahn (as a literary professor and a musician respectively). But I would have been just as excited if Simon and Co. had cast nothing but unknown local musicians and non-actors in key roles. Which is also in part what they did. It worked in The Wire, which had a cast filled with ex-cons playing everything from ministers to hitgirls.
Treme will not only be a gripping, real drama written by a team of novelists, but it will also be an education in New Orleans and the culture which makes it identifiable as the home of so many internationally influential social and cultural trends. It is a city which has 40 or 50 per cent less citizens now than before Katrina struck, and it is a place I visited in 2004, a year before that disaster which changed everything and made Treme possible. We went on a driving tour around the city, under the intolerable summer sun. The driver was a cheerful man who told us that he had never left New Orleans in his life, despite being in his early 40s. Anywhere else in the world that would be considered to be a revealing comment on the individual, but in New Orleans it is the perfect way to explain the inescapably surreal, celebratory and contradictory atmosphere of the city which is identifiable as both bliss and torture, often at the same time. Nowhere else are the trials and triumphs of the American dream so inextricably condensed.
Treme has already begun playing on HBO in America, with viewing figures high enough to warrant the commissioning of a second series just a couple of episodes into its run. Some UK broadcaster will pick it up, hopefully before the year is out, and if you want to sharpen your expectations to a white hot needle of teenage lust, check out this trailer. Or if you want a comprehensive investigation of Treme and the creative process by which it is produced, check out this article.
