True Detective

I loved True Detec­tive. I’m still read­ing arti­cles about how the show will end and all the spec­u­la­tion sur­round­ing it. Heck, they could inter­view any­one who was on set, even if it was just for a day, and I’d prob­a­bly read that.

Here’s the Vul­ture’s inter­view with the pro­duc­tion design­er talk­ing about the effort that went into build­ing Car­cosa. It’s amazing.

I Want to Like Kenny Powers

But I can’t help but feel like it’s a base­ball-cen­tric Entourage, with John­ny Dra­ma in the lead role.

Hav­ing said that, I enjoyed East­bound and Down this morn­ing. Stayed up way too late watch­ing TV last night. Mad Men, Board­walk Empire and East­bound and Down in one night? How am I sup­posed to catch up on Bored to Death? Do peo­ple still watch that? Or is that borne of an Ander­son guilt com­plex in me, where­by I real­ly want to like any­thing that reads as an homage to Truffaut?

Also, can some­one explain to me why the Board­walk Empire intro is like Dead­liest Catch, but with bot­tles instead of crabs?

Absorbing “Treme”

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.)