At the very beginning of the new HBO series “Treme,” set partly in the New Orleans neighborhood of that name, “three months after,” we see a succession of extreme closeups—a reed being worked around a man’s mouth in preparation for playing, the top of a liquor bottle with its torn wrapping around the lip, the ligature of a brass instrument being adjusted, a cluster of white boa feathers being jostled in a light wind. There’s no larger visual context for the shots, but they’re compelling, one of them in particular—a shot that examines someone’s coat button, then follows a trail of smoke to a burning cigarette held by a black-gloved hand. The camera is fascinated by what it sees; its eye couldn’t get in any closer.
“Treme” was created by David Simon, whose HBO drama “The Wire” ended two years ago, and Eric Overmyer, a veteran producer and writer on “Law & Order” and “Homicide: Life on the Street,” the cop series based on Simon’s book. In “Treme,” your gaze is always brought from the general to the specific, or—more specifically—to a dense mesh of details that don’t always appear to make sense or add up easily. That approach is a fitting one for looking at New Orleans, especially post-Katrina, assuming that Simon and Overmyer can get under the city’s skin. It’s one thing to take us to New Orleans—anyone can do that—but not everyone can take us inside New Orleans. Simon, a former city reporter for the Baltimore Sun, has spoken of his love of New Orleans music and his feeling about the importance of the city, and Overmyer, who’s also a playwright, lives there part time; they had thought about setting a series there even before Hurricane Katrina. There’s no way of knowing, obviously, but my guess is that a Simon series made before Katrina probably wouldn’t have been that different from the one we’re seeing now. New Orleans is nothing if not complex, and complexity is what Simon is drawn to.
In “The Wire,” you don’t always know what you’re looking at; characters can enter and exit without being introduced (you could make the case that sometimes leaving viewers uneasy and in the dark, not the use of bad language or depictions of sex, is the biggest difference between cable and network drama). That’s true in “Treme” as well, and it’s true also of some of the sights we see and the terms we hear. A man jumps out of bed in the morning and is excited to hear music in the street. “It’s the first second line since the storm,” he says to the woman in the bed. “It sounds like rebirth.” I thought he meant that symbolically—and it does work on that level—but he was referring to the Rebirth Brass Band; the people who join in brass-band processions, getting caught up in singing and dancing, are known as the second line. More than most cities, New Orleans is a world unto itself, and you’re plunged right into it. Even the opening credits are, by design—literally so—ambiguous. The marks left by the flood and the toxic mold that flowered in people’s homes form the background to the names of the cast and the creators. The flood lines, seen close up, are painterly, their drip marks seeming to betray an artist’s hand, and the blooms of mold come in a range of colors; each frame looks like a work of abstract art. (Spike Lee’s documentary “When the Levees Broke,” an essential, damning piece of work that has to be seen by anyone who wants to know the first thing about the disaster, also uses the signs of flood damage as a backdrop to the film’s title; there the colors are mostly red and black, invoking blood and death.)
The “failure of institutions”—law enforcement, education, journalism—was Simon’s stated subject in “The Wire”; “Treme” may build to that, but its early episodes focus on depicting New Orleans accurately. Simon hired the writers Tom Piazza, the author of the 2005 book “Why New Orleans Matters,” and Lolis Eric Elie, a former Times-Picayune columnist (and the writer and co-director of a film called “Faubourg Tremé: The Untold Story of Black New Orleans”). In a column three years ago that was timed for the start of Mardi Gras and published in the Washington Post—it was intended for the eyes of the federal government and the eyes of the nation—Elie wrote of the coming marauders: “They will empty their beer-filled guts onto each other’s shoes. They will clown for hungry cameras and for journalists eager to capture New Orleans as some distant editor has imagined it. Invariably, the networks will set up their shots in the French Quarter, though none of the major parades and few of the emblematic Carnival activities take place there. Neither the journalists nor the revelers seem to care that our lives, local lives, are elsewhere.”
Tremé (spelled by some, including Simon, without an accent), adjacent to the French Quarter, is one of the elsewhere places: largely unknown to outsiders, it’s thought to be the oldest African-American neighborhood in the country and had a large population of free blacks even before the Civil War. Historically, it’s the musical heart of the city, going all the way back to the seventeen-hundreds, when slaves were allowed to gather in Congo Square (now contained within Louis Armstrong Park) to dance and play music. For authenticity’s sake, Simon and Overmyer brought in local musicians, including the saxophonist Donald Harrison, Jr., and the trumpeter Kermit Ruffins, who was a co-founder of the Rebirth Brass Band, and whose current group, the Barbecue Swingers, appears in the series, as do Dr. John and Allen Toussaint. The character who gets out of bed to hear the second line is Davis McAlary (Steve Zahn); he’s based on a real New Orleans musician named Davis Rogan, who also consulted on “Treme.” David Mills, a longtime friend and collaborator of Simon’s, was part of the show’s writing and producing team as well; he died last week, of a brain aneurysm, during production. It was a shocking blow, in many ways, to the fellowship of the group and to television fans who knew, and invariably admired, his work on “The Corner,” “Homicide,” “NYPD Blue,” “ER,” and “The Wire.”
It’s heartening (and mind-bending) to know that for some scenes the production team had to re-create the damage caused by the flood, because by the time shooting began, last year, repairs and reconstruction were under way. “How’s your house?” people ask each other, almost as a greeting. But just as important to Simon and Overmyer’s story is the fact that not all the damage in New Orleans occurred in 2005, and that the city’s own peculiarities have generated plenty of trouble. LaDonna Batiste-Williams (Khandi Alexander, who played the drug-addicted mother in “The Corner”), a bar owner, is trying to find her brother, missing since the storm, and is facing law-enforcement officials who are trying to cover up corruption or incompetence, or both. She asks her current husband to appeal to his brother, a civil-court judge. But he looks down on her, as a rougher, lower-class, darker-skinned black; when he balks, she tells her lawyer, in frustration, that her husband’s family is “into that Seventh Ward Creole shit, like they a different fucking race.” The lawyer, Toni Bernette (Melissa Leo), the person who’s doing the most to help LaDonna, is white. LaDonna’s ex-husband, an irresponsible charmer named Antoine Batiste (the wonderful Wendell Pierce, a native New Orleanian, who played Detective Bunk Moreland in “The Wire”), essentially ignores the two children they have together. To us, he may be what makes New Orleans what it is, but to her he’s a problem. Someone asks her what made the marriage go sour. “I married a goddam musician,” she says. “Ain’t no way to make that shit right.”
“Treme” isn’t in the business of taking a socioeconomic or political view of the storm’s ravages (if there was a reference to President Bush in the first three episodes, I missed it) or of drawing many moral distinctions between characters. There’s no sense of judgments being made, except when it comes to non-natives. If you want to snicker a little at Davis McAlary, the puckish, amusingly annoying musician, a scruffy white guy completely immersed in black music and culture, when you find out that he comes from a top-drawer local family and that his empty pockets are a matter of choice, you’re on your own. The dramatic information in “Treme,” as of the first three episodes, is essentially cultural and musical. John Goodman plays a Tulane English professor who makes angry declamations to inquiring journalists, throwing a British TV reporter’s microphone into a canal when he suggests that the city doesn’t deserve to be saved. His way out of his rage is to take up a novel that he once started writing, about the New Orleans flood of 1927. Clarke Peters (Detective Lester Freamon in “The Wire”) plays a contractor who returns to Treme to rebuild his house but feels an even more urgent need to re-form his group of Mardi Gras Indians, who have a long tradition in New Orleans street rituals. One night, he dresses up in costume and goes looking for one of his old cohorts, and we see him dancing in the dark, in an enormous costume of red and gold feathers. I’d never seen anything like it in a TV show. And yet it didn’t strike me as exotic, since that’s a word I would use to describe something I felt distanced from. But here I felt a strong connection. I think this is what Simon wanted to have happen to viewers, though so far it hasn’t happened to me very often. The characters in the show are ambivalent about outsiders, and if you’re at all sensitive to that you feel intrusive, rude—almost a colonialist—for appreciating what you see and hear in “Treme.” The series virtually prohibits you from loving it, while asking you to value it. In that sense, I suppose, it may be the bravest show that David Simon has ever made. ♦