The "show about New Orleans for New Orleanians" that isn't actually for New Orleanians

Some of you, for whatever reason, may still actually think about the show Treme from time to time.  It's almost over now.  This means people will be slightly more likely to talk about it for a while.

Here's a short post by Brian Moore which touches on the, by now, familiar criticisms of the show; its slow pacing, its lack of a compelling narrative arc, its overwrought NOLAier-than-thou scenesterism. But this passage, I think, contains the most important point.

The final line of defense is it’s a show about New Orleans, for New Orleanians. There are all sorts of problems with that – since when is parochialism a virtue? – but based on the anecdotal evidence I see on New Orleans social media, it’s my guess Treme‘s not as popular in The Big Easy as some assume it to be. Stack it up against a Saints game and its local ratings would plummet to zero. Around 29 million households in the United States pay for HBO; with disposable income being limited in New Orleans and with all the complaints about a local “digital divide,” here’s doubting many of them are clustered in Orleans Parish. If the show is Simon’s gift to the city, then there’s a certain lack of gratitude.

Treme is not a show "for New Orleanians." It is a show for a very specific upper middle class slice of premium cable subscribers who harbor a romanticized fetish for non-threateningly exotic American vacation spots. 

Anyway Moore's post sparked a long-ish Twitter discussion the other day which caused me to go back and dig up my review of the pilot.  When I posted that a bunch of pissed off people told me to "trust the storyteller" and give the genius time to unravel his narrative or whatever.  But looking back, there's nothing in that post that isn't still true today. 

#Standing

Wait a minute. I was certain I heard David Simon recently drone on and on about how much he didn't care about "standing." It's all very confusing.

But when he suggested in a recent piece for CJR that people like me who disagree with his position on paid content were unqualified, that got under my skin a bit. Simon wrote, “These folks (paywall opponents) don’t understand the first thing about actual journalism.” He also lumped us in with an imaginary crowd of people who supposedly think amateurs can replace professionals, though we take no such position.

Owens goes on from there with a robust list of reasons "David Simon is wrong about paywalls." Go read the rest of the article. It's free to access.

To me the central question here is one of mission. If, for instance, you believe the purpose of a daily news publication is to provide quality reporting to a small but well educated and relatively affluent niche of the population then the notion of a digital subscription model might be attractive to you. David Simon produces a smug and boring show about the "authenticity" of New Orleans culture meant for an educated and affluent niche audience of premium cable subscribers and that works quite well for him.

You say the TV looks like your life*

I notice a frequent go-to excuse for Treme heads regarding the show's improbable, masturbatory, self-referential dialogue is to tell us that what we may think is just crappy writing is, in fact, "gritty realism" or "not normal TV." Not only is this clearly a cop-out it's also just false. "Normal TV" is actually littered with crappy dialogue. Tooth grinding awfulness is one of television drama's defining characteristics. Treme is no exception. It's bad in the same way most of everything else on TV is bad.

Here's an example of what I'm talking about from a recent Offbeat interview with some of our favorite Treme bloggers.

Shea: If you’re watching a program where the topic and characters are something that you’re involved in in real life, you know too much and you can see the moving parts in the dialogue, and that makes it hard to suspend disbelief. Some people from New Orleans have this thing where if someone makes reference to red-beans-and-rice-and-it’s-not-even-a-Monday, people laugh because it’s obvious, but, people talk like that all the damn time here. You hear it coming out of an actor’s mouth, it sounds like a cliché because you know it’s a cliché.

Being the "some people" in question here, I should say that the problem is not simply that this is a cliche' (although it is that). It's that it's over-hip unnecessary exposition which natives like me feel a bit exploited by and outsiders talked down to by. It's almost the very definition of poseurism. Also it's crappy dialogue. And it's crap dialogue even if "people talk like that all the time down here." Which they do not. Well, okay, my Dad has been known to say stupid and morose shit like, "You know the last float in my Mardi Gras parade is gonna be passing real soon now" but he's kind of an asshole anyway.

By the way, if you'd like to complain about any of this to Treme creator David Simon in person, you might like to register for this year's Rising Tide Conference where he'll be a featured speaker.


*

I'm not gonna watch Treme

My wife is from Baltimore and, the way she tells it, everyone there seemed to think of The Wire as a nuisance more than anything else. I've already had enough of my attempts at parking/walking/driving around town disrupted by the Treme crews to be sort of pissed myself. And besides, I don't get HBO and won't order it just for one show.

I like David Simon. From what I've seen and read, he appears to have a lot of important things to say about journalism, crime, and urban America. (For a taste, here is on the Bill Moyers show last year) But, and this is a personal take, I also think preachy TV melodrama is a horrible medium for communicating anything of worth to anyone. For me, the treatment of real-life problems as fodder for non-satirical serial tele-fiction only trivializes those issues to their own detriment. If I read a story in the paper about murder or flood victims, I feel sympathy for them and outrage at the conditions responsible for their plight. If I have to watch a contrived after-school special about whiny fictional approximations of those victims, I am rooting for the malevolent conditions. The bits of The Wire I've seen have generated no exception to this phenomenon.

At the same time, I know that other people, for whatever reason, aren't as sensitive to these issues as I am and will be watching and discussing the show as it airs. I will be interested in reading what they have to say about it.

Update: First of all, Ugh! If you feel like picking through that sprawling mess of a New York Times Magazine piece be my guest. Better to just take a look at the synopsis provided here by the Gambit blog. I know it's a TV series and thus designed to spin out indefinitely, but could someone at least begin to describe the plotline here?

More importantly, the characters are pretty much another assemblage of NOLA cliches designed to please tourists, transplants, and Jazzfest assholes. And that's no surprise. The show is written for a relatively affluent national audience (HBO subscribers). Under ordinary circumstances, I'd just write it off as more of the same bullshit packaging of NOLA-Disney for the Yuppie Intellectual we've been rotting with for most of our lives. But this is different. Here is Treme's primary pitch according to its HBO pub,

TREME begins in fall 2005, three months after Hurricane Katrina and the massive engineering failure in which flood control failed throughout New Orleans, flooding 80 percent of the city and displacing hundreds of thousands of residents. Fictional events depicted in the series will honor the actual chronology of political, economic and cultural events following the storm.

This isn't just a cheap trip to New Orleans. Instead, we are asked to see it as a dissertation on the effects of the Flood on the people of the city brought to us by critically acclaimed "auteur" (NYT's word) David Simon. In other words, a national audience is asked to believe it will be seeing something of authoritative substance regarding a catastrophic event. But Treme purports to "honor" New Orleans's experience of the Federal Flood through a palate of characters who represent the most cartoonish image of the city as seen from the outside.

Ordinarily I'd be irked. But because Treme baldly sells itself as a bid for the sympathies of the nation, I am actually pissed off. Not everyone in New Orleans is a musician or a chef... or a musical chef... or a guy who writes about musical chefs. We're a more complicated place than all of that. Frankly, I think we're a much better place than what that caricature suggests. But the underlying message conveyed by Treme is that flood victims don't merit concern on the basis of their humanity alone. It's telling us what's really important is that we (well some of us anyway) can sing and dance.

I don't do either very well and yet I want my city preserved anyway. We all should want it preserved, rebuilt, protected, not because it contains some talented people but because all of its people are Americans whose home was broken by the Corps. Allowing that case to be diluted by interloping "auteurs" attuned to the sensibilities of middle-American intellectuals is ultimately more belittling than it is useful.