Treme

By Jaimey Fisher

In Treme, Jaimey Fisher analyzes how the HBO television series Treme (2010–13) treads new ground by engaging with historical events and their traumatic aftermaths, in particular with Hurricane Katrina in 2005 and subsequent flooding in New Orleans. Instead of building up to a devastating occurrence, David Simon’s much anticipated follow-up to The Wire (2002-08) unfolds with characters coping in the wake of catastrophe, in a mode that Fisher explores as "afterness." Treme charts these changes while also memorializing the number of New Orleans cultures that were immediately endangered.

David Simon’s and Eric Overmyer’s Treme attempts something unprecedented for a multi-season series. Although the show follows, in some ways, in the celebrated footsteps of The Wire—for example, in its elegiac tracking of the historical struggles of an American city—Fisher investigates how Treme varies from The Wire’s work with genre and what replaces it: The Wire is a careful, even baroque variation on the police drama, while Treme dispenses with genre altogether. This poses considerable challenges for popular television, which Simon and Overmyer address in several ways, including by offering a carefully montaged map of New Orleans and foregrounding the distance witnessing of watershed events there. Another way in which Treme sets itself apart is its memorialization of the city’s inestimable contributions to American music, especially to jazz, soul, rhythm and blues, rap, rock, and funk. Treme gives such music and its many makers unprecedented attention, both in terms of screen time for music and narrative exposition around musicians. A key element of the volume is its look at the show’s themes of race, crime, and civil rights as well as the corporate versus community recovery and remaking of the city.

Treme’s synthesizing mélange of the arts in their specific geographical context, coupled with political and socio-economic analysis of the city, highlights the show’s unique approach. Fans of the works of Simon and Overmyer, as well as television studies students and scholars, will enjoy this keen-eyed approach to a beloved show.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Wayne State University Press
• Release date: Nov 11, 2019
• ISBN: 9780814341520

Jaimey Fisher

Jaimey Fisher, professor of German and of cinema and digital media at the University of California, Davis, is author of German Ways of War; Treme; Christian Petzold; and Disciplining Germany: Youth, Reeducation, and Reconstruction after the Second World War. With Marco Abel, he coedited The Berlin School and Its Global Contexts: A Transnational Art Cinema, and with Peter Uwe Hohendahl, he coedited Critical Theory: Current State and Future Prospects.

Book preview

Treme

TV Milestones

Series Editors

Barry Keith Grant

Brock University

Jeannette Sloniowski

Brock University

TV Milestones is part of the Contemporary Approaches to Film and Media Series

A complete listing of the books in this series can be found online at wsupress.wayne.edu

General Editor

Barry Keith Grant

Brock University

Advisory Editors

Robert J. Burgoyne

University of St. Andrews

Caren J. Deming

University of Arizona

Patricia B. Erens

School of the Art Institute of Chicago

Peter X. Feng

University of Delaware

Lucy Fischer

University of Pittsburgh

Frances Gateward

California State University, Northridge

Tom Gunning

University of Chicago

Thomas Leitch

University of Delaware

Walter Metz

Southern Illinois University

Treme

Jaimey Fisher

TV MILESTONES SERIES

Wayne State University Press Detroit

© 2019 by Wayne State University Press. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced without formal permission.

ISBN 978-0-8143-4151-3 (paperback)

ISBN 978-0-8143-4152-0 (e-book)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2019905347

Wayne State University Press

Leonard N. Simons Building

4809 Woodward Avenue

Detroit, Michigan 48201-1309

Visit us online at wsupress.wayne.edu

For our little New Orleanian, Noah

Contents

Acknowledgments

1. Of Low and No Concepts: David Simon and Eric Overmyer’s Art Television

2. Form and Content: Networked Narrative, Montage Maps, and Television Witnessing

3. New Orleans Music and Food: Affect and the Political Economy of Cultural Production

4. Networked Narrative and New Orleans’s Criminal Justice System

5. The Concrete Abstractions of the Televisual City: Albert, Nelson, and Treme’s Disaster Capitalism

Conclusion: The Counter-publics of Albert’s Mardi Gras Indians, Antoine’s Musical Meanderings, and Simon/Overmyer’s Treme

References

Index

Acknowledgments

This study had the good fortune to be well supported throughout by colleagues, family, and friends, especially from New Orleans. I would like to thank the staff at the Hogan Jazz Archive at Tulane, especially Bruce Raeburn, Lynn Abbott, and Alaina Hébert, as well as David Kunian at the New Orleans Jazz Museum and the Historic New Orleans Collection. At Wayne State University Press, I am grateful to Annie Martin for originating the project, and, when she was unsurprisingly elevated at the press, to Marie Sweetman for shepherding it at a later stage.

Among the pleasures of working on this book were the renewed connections to old friends: Elio Brancaforte, Olaf Schmidt, and Marline Otte offered indispensable guidance and advice, while my experience of New Orleans will always be inextricably entwined with the kindness and good humor of George Cummins. Richard Campanella at Tulane was generous with his time and expertise. At UC Davis, Andrew Smith offered his considerable insight into serial television, while Sally McKee was extraordinarily giving with her time and perspicacity in discussing the city and especially its music. I would also like to thank Paul Reitter, Robyn Warhol, and especially Sean O’Sullivan, and Bryan Wagner, who engaged with the text at crucial moments. Radu Cóstin, Steven Birenbaum, and Matthew Goldstein gave the manuscript careful critical reads at a late point, and to them I am grateful.

Finally, but most of all, I thank Jacqueline and our daughter Alexandra for their tireless support and endless patience. This volume is dedicated to our son, Noah, our little New Orleanian born shortly before the storm/flood, who will always bind us, like so much that is precious, to the city.

1

Of Low and No Concepts

David Simon and Eric Overmyer’s Art Television

When he first read it, my agent told me that [Treme] wasn’t low concept—it was no concept.

—David Simon

When Treme premiered on HBO on April 11, 2010, it was an unprecedented event in the already groundbreaking wave of post-1990 quality or prestige television (Newman and Levine 2012, esp. 23–26, 97–98; see also Filippo 2016, 5). The prestige-television trend had already transformed the nation’s long-dominant audiovisual medium, sometimes beyond medium-specific recognition, with rampant comparisons to great films and books. But Treme was unprecedented even within this wave because the very public co-creator of the series, David Simon, was following up on a success of unlikely, even breathtaking, proportions: the critical plaudits and industry affirmation garnered by The Wire. Running five highly differentiated seasons (from 2002 to 2008), the Baltimore-set program had been praised as the best television show of all time, compared to both seminal cinema and landmark literature (Williams 2014, loc. 198; Vint 2013, loc. 151). It gave breakthrough boosts to the careers of actors like Idris Elba and Michael B. Jordan as well as Aidan Gillen and Amy Ryan. The Wire would be, indeed, a tough artistic act to follow, and Simon, with his co-creator, Eric Overmyer, chose to do so with something remarkably different—definitively divergent—from his celebrated depiction of Baltimore.

As the epigraph above suggests, the ambitious aims and high aesthetic stakes of Treme are not immediately clear from, say, an industry agent’s conventional perspective. Simon’s anecdote comes in a commentary about how he and Overmyer intended Treme to be, at a fundamental dramatic level, different from most television. This was not a show, he emphasizes, for people who have sucked at the teat of television’s usual generic fare (Simon and Overmyer). The other dominant multiple-series showrunners in this recent quality wave—probably only Ryan Murphy (Glee, American Crime Story), David Milch (Deadwood, Luck), Vince Gilligan (Breaking Bad, Better Call Saul), and Jill Soloway (Transparent, I Love Dick) are comparable—have repeatedly returned to the well of time-tested genres, including crime/policiers, westerns, comedies, and family dramas. Simon and Overmyer, however, chose to undertake something surprisingly ambitious with Treme, the first series of the quality-television wave to dispense with genre altogether. Treme seems an unusually high-profile example of what Kristin Thompson has called art television, which attempts to transcend traditional television genres by trafficking in a much higher degree of narrative multiplicity, complexity, and ambiguity (2003, 58–59, 131–33).

In fascinating ways that I aim to unfold herein, Treme represents a more mature moment of this celebrated wave of prestige television than those pioneering moments of The Sopranos, Mad Men, Deadwood, Breaking Bad, or Homeland. First and foremost, Treme breaks new ground by engaging with epoch-making historical events and their traumatic aftermaths. The 2005 Hurricane Katrina and subsequent flooding count as world-historical developments that irrevocably transformed a major city in a matter of hours, and Treme charts these changes while also memorializing the myriad New Orleans cultures that were immediately endangered by the storm and its wide, flooding wake. If the broad canvas of the urban landscape on which Simon and Overmyer work recalls The Wire, the pointed specificity of its history sets Treme distinctly apart. What further distinguishes Treme is, in fact, its uniquely no-concept approach, at least in terms of traditional plotting. Treme dispenses with a dominant A plot inhabited by the bad-boy man-child familiar from so many of the above-mentioned iterations of prestige TV, frequently with close-orbiting B plots thrown in as the shows are renewed and grow into multiple seasons (with characters such as Christopher Moltisanti in The Sopranos, Peggy Olson in Mad Men, and Jesse Pinkman and then Gus Fring in Breaking Bad). Rather, Treme builds on a thoroughgoing proliferation and democratization of its plotlines from the outset: it topples the tortured and torturing man-child at the center of the narrative universe and replaces him—it’s almost always him in the early prestige-TV wave, Homeland and the recent Handmaid’s Tale excepted—with a wide and provocative array of plotlines equally attended to. This approach even varies from that deployed in The Wire, Show Me a Hero, and recently in The Deuce. Even more than those other Simon-created works, over its thirty-six episodes Treme exploits the serial nature of prestige TV to establish what I sketch below as a networked narrative of diverse characters that is then scaled through montage to encompass both city and country.

Before moving on to the way Treme traces the recent history of New Orleans, the Gulf Coast, and the U.S. government’s handling of the crisis, there are a number of facts about the 2005 hurricane and flooding worth recalling. Katrina was part of an unusually active hurricane season, and the so-called once-in-a-century storm—although these now come much more often than once a century—reached category 5 (that is, winds above 157 miles per hour) in the Gulf of Mexico on August 28. Contrary to commonly held belief, however, the storm had weakened to at least category 3 (sustained winds of approximately 125 miles per hour) by the time it struck the Gulf Coast east of New Orleans on August 29. The storm itself did some damage, though not devastating, to metro New Orleans that day, but the levees and canal systems failed at numerous points in the city, leading to breathtakingly fast flooding of entire neighborhoods—indeed, probably much more rapid flooding than could have been caused by hurricane rains. The particularly flooded areas of the city were not so much those near the Mississippi River but rather those near other bodies of water and waterways, especially Lake Pontchartrain and New Orleans’s extensive system of canals. Especially affected were the middle-class Lakeview and Gentilly and the more working-class Central City, New Orleans East, and Lower Ninth Ward (Krupa 2011). Generally, more affluent Uptown (counterintuitively located southwest of downtown/the French Quarter) was largely unaffected by the flooding, although it was pummeled by storm winds and rain. Many other sections of the city, flooded due to the levee failure, suffered sustained waters of ten to fifteen feet. As Professor Calvin Mackie recounts in Spike Lee’s emphatically titled When the Levees Broke (2006) and as was later confirmed by the American Society of Civil Engineers, the failure of the New Orleans levee system constitutes the worst civil engineering catastrophe in U.S. history (Roth n.d.)—one that killed at least fourteen hundred people and put to flight hundreds of thousands more. More than ten years later, the city is still smaller than it was before the storm. As elaborated below, the governmental response was severely lacking, and it took almost a year to pump all the water out of the city. Ed Blakely, who became the recovery czar in 2007, recounts that no federal dollars actually flowed to the city for rebuilding until November 2007, more than two years after the storm. For these myriad reasons, locals insist that the events of August–September 2005 were not (as even President Obama said) a natural disaster but a human-made one, a shocking and fatal failure of government in a project that the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers designed and built and that local governments ineffectively monitored and inadequately maintained.

Geographical Titles, Race, and the Black Spatial Imaginary

Amid the innovations of The Corner and The Wire, one core ambition does conspicuously persist and even broaden in Treme—namely, Simon’s unusual focus on race and the abiding yet ever-changing kaleidoscope of challenges that racial equality and justice have faced in the U.S. Elaborating on The Wire in this way as well, Treme was the first of the prestige-television wave to offer an African American protagonist—or ethnic minority protagonist of any kind, for that matter. Many of the prestige series thematize and problematize the whiteness of their central figures (from Twin Peaks’ Special Agent Cooper to Breaking Bad’s Walter [very] White), but it is perhaps the demographics of the cable and subscription television powering this prestige wave that has provided for the cascade of white European American protagonists within it (see Gray 1995, 68). Although there is not a specific chapter in this book dedicated to race, that is in no way to diminish the importance of race to Treme or to New Orleans—indeed, this should only underscore the issue all the more, since race runs through every chapter, as red thread and as fault line.

In thinking about the inextricability of race to both the form and content of Treme—and to New Orleans and the U.S. generally—one might start with the title of the show, which foregrounds myriad and multifaceted historical aspects of how race and racism, to echo George Lipsitz (2011), take place. Simon and Overmyer’s title is drawn from the neighborhood of New Orleans known originally as Faubourg Tremé, an area carved out circa 1810 from agricultural lands behind or in back of (or adjacent, to the northwest) the city’s oldest section, the French Quarter. For these reasons, it and nearby neighborhoods are sometimes known colloquially as back of town, as one blog about Treme was entitled. This geographically specific history is detailed in Lolis Eric Elie’s prizewinning documentary of 2008, Faubourg Tremé: The Untold Story of Black New Orleans, a clear influence on Treme. Elie was even brought on as a writer by Simon and Overmyer. As Elie’s film explores, the Treme neighborhood is known as America’s oldest black neighborhood (Thomas 2014, 110) and was—not coincidentally—the birthplace of jazz, even if the music was not called that for decades. Although the show traverses wide swaths of New Orleans and the principal characters do not all live or convene in Treme, referencing the neighborhood in the title is provocative. It confirms a thoroughly racialized geography, a margin close at hand, as Treme borders the famed tourist destination of the French Quarter but is much less