The first 10 episodes of Treme wrapped up Sunday night, and I’m sort of relieved. Even with the dearth of summer programming, watching in recent weeks had become a bit of a chore. Not that I don’t like it, I just need a break. Investing 10 hours into a series without ever pinning down its purpose is frustrating.
Again, I like Treme, for many reasons, but mostly for a trio of strong female characters and actors, all of whom saw major arcs come to a conclusion in the last episode.
Beaten down by the post-hurricane depression and unpaid bills, Janette (Kim Dickens) finally quit New Orleans. She traded in her food truck for a one-way ticket to New York, where she’ll presumably be welcomed by new BCFs (best chefs forever!) Tom Colicchio, Wylie Dufresne, David Chang and Eric Ripert. It could be an appropriate exit, swinging the door wide open for Davis/Annie canoodling. But Dickens says she’ll return as a regular for season two, which also works just fine. With turns on Deadwood, Friday Night Lights and Lost, she’s the sort of becoming the Sam Jackson of good TV.
And then there’s Ladonna (Khandi Alexander), who buried her brother and decided an investigation into his prison death wasn’t worth the anguish. She put her grieving mother in a car with her dependable but square husband immediately after the funeral and then let go of months of sadness in the second line—or would that make it the main line? I’m not sure, but seeing her swing her white hankie and shake her shoulders to her ex’s blaring trombone was invigorating. In a perfect world, this opens her up for some lighter material next season.
If there’s to be Emmy nominations or wins for Treme, well, they’ll likely involve some posthumous honor for writer/producer David Mills who died a few weeks before the series premiered. But if there’s any statues tossed around after that, I hope they’re aimed squarely for Khandi Alexander. (How she ended up cooling her gifted heels at CSI: Miami for seven seasons makes no sense.)
Which brings us to Toni, whose player (Melissa Leo) is easily the most high profile of the three. But all season, she walked an unappealing line between the show’s most compelling and least convincing stories. As a lawyer, her work tracking down Ladonna’s brother was seemingly the only high-stakes arc in play. It was a mystery, and her dedication to the people of New Orleans who slipped into the system’s cracks while everyone else was concerned with other matters was refreshing next to all of her defeatist counterparts—particularly her husband. Professor Creighton Bernette (John Goodman) had the potential to be Treme‘s compassionate narrator, burdened by the events that brought his city down but offering a literary perspective could give the fairly rudderless show some context. Instead, he got the worst dialogue—an honor shared with his daughter—and in an overly foreshadowed turn, an early exit via suicide.
Because he was painted so thin, at least compared to everyone else on the series, the story of Toni’s home life never flourished. She was weighed down by her family’s dopey YouTube forays and the series’ only overly literal acknowledgments of the hurricane and the government’s failure to properly address its wrath. But now he’s dead, which is good for Toni, though maybe only from the viewers’ perspective. Her new burden as a single mother should leave her unburdened in the long run. Eh?
So what happens now? HBO was very generous in its immediate renewal of Treme, but the network doesn’t have a track record of maintaining generosity for long. Ratings hovered below 1 million for most of the season, dipping as low as 687,000 a few weeks back, and even the unanimous critical praise is beleaguered by the consensus that this might not be going anywhere.
I hate to sound demanding. I really like to think I have an above average attention span when it comes to television, but it was tested for much the first season. And as we and the characters get more and more distance from Katrina, I’m not sure what kind of trajectory will come into focus. Then again, that might be the point.