Everything you need to know about what's wrong with Treme

Read this.

But the real problem is that when Treme's musician characters aren't playing music, they're talking about it. I like to think of myself as somebody who likes music a lot, and clearly the people writing Treme do, too. But whenever anybody on Treme talks about music, they make it sound like something I would hate. They use words like "chops" and refer to the guy who wrote "Don't Think Twice, It's All Right" as "Bobby Z," and say things like "Modern jazz is a lonely road" and "Did you read that Down Beat review? Right as rain!" and describe music in which disparate genres mix and mingle by comparing the results to "gumbo," all without even a smidge of irony. They talk like people reading liner notes out loud. During Season 2, whenever the show cut to Steve Earle Yoda-ing the earnest fiddle player Annie T. about the craft of songwriting — turns out some songs that seem to be about the weather are actually about love and being sad! — I wanted to beat myself deaf with a rolled-up back issue of Paste magazine.

And that's it in a nutshell. I like music. I like New Orleans. But I can't stand this slow motion mess of David Simon and his fanboy nation's pseudo-intellectual superiority complex being puked all over us like this. It's probable that much of New Orleans laps up this puke is yet another manifestation of its chronic inferiority complex but that's a whole other discussion.