David Simon's, post Katrina, show has had an odd path (notice how I avoided the word journey there?) to where it is now. An oh so worthy first season that made you feel you had to act like the albino priest in the Di Vinci Code just to watch it. A second season with the most tedious storyline in television history, where Jon Seda'scharacter spent episode after episode looking for a builder. It was so dull it made Saturday Kitchen look like 24. That's not to say Treme didn't have its powerful and moving moments, in its first two outings, it did, but you always get the feeling it's not quite as powerful as it thinks it is. But there are a couple of joys to watching Treme, seeing how long an episode lasts when you speed the musical interludes and spotting which actors were in Simon's previous shows Homicide, The Corner, or The Wire.
So here we are three seasons in and all our characters are doing exactly what they always do, keep on keeping on New Orleans style. That is another problem I have with the show usually by now I'd know the names of the vast majority of characters in a programme I'd watched for two seasons, this far into The Wire I probably knew them all, but beyond Steve Zahn's mildly aggravating DJ Davis and Wendall Pierce's put upon musician Antoine I'm struggling. That's not to say that the cast is poor, far from it, the acting in Treme is first rate, everything about Treme seems to be first rate, but something is missing that would elevate this to the heights of the greats. So what we really have is in place of a tough, hard hitting social drama, is the world's classiest soap opera, but then again the revamped Dallas gives it a strong run for its money in that category.
Over
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