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.
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