It’s way too late on a school night for me to really dig into everything I thought about while watching David Simon’s latest opus, “Treme,” on HBO. What I have been collecting, however, are other peoples’ feelings about the show and I am positively fascinated by the response.
I’ll start with the obvious. Lots of people hated the show! For all sorts of reasons! Some of them deserved, some not so much! I’m sympathetic; I enjoyed ‘The Wire’ plenty, but only after my wife convinced me of its brilliance and even then I harbored some angst about the cult of David Simon. He’s arrogant! Read this great post-mortem with the essential Alan Sepinwall and you’ll see what I mean.
There are more glib, entertaining responses to the show. I loved the Awl’s shouting match. It embodies my internal dialogue — yes, dialogue — on the show almost too perfectly to admit.
I adored David Raposa’s plea to reconsider troubled academic Creighton Burnette, even if I never especially cared for his character, particularly because, as a recovering academic who labored in the language arts, I can understand his passion for others to share his view, to see the city as he does, to experience it in the rich body of work that has been produced in and about New Orleans.
The only conclusion I can safely draw from all of this is that I need to watch the entire series again, as soon as possible, probably between episodes of “Mad Men” and “Deadliest Catch” or whatever you watch in the summer months that isn’t Step Brothers on on demand.
(It goes without saying that I’m one of those people who LUUURRVEES THE MUSICCCCCC. I listen to it often via the Songs from Treme Tumblr, which I run through trntbl here.)