Anticipating Treme aka "Tremé" - David Simon and his buddies do post-Katrina N.O.

momus cameo in this episode

Wow only one post this week! Everyone's dropped this show by now I guess? (or watching it several days later like I am) It really isn't very exciting. Amazing how the musician/celebrity cameos have been getting more and more pointless each episode. I guess I almost cared about the outcome of the Annie/Davis thing... almost. Poor Ladonna though.

i'm still interested but i haven't had time to sit at a computer and catch up, so i'm still at ep 3. have there been any more second line scenes? i still want to see if i made it into the background somewhere. :/

looking at the wiki, i'm pretty sure the second line i was at is in ep 5.

I dropped it. It's boring and didactic and I wanted to watch Mad Men. : (

Treme is boring so you went to MAD MEN!?

it seems ok so far?

I think my enthusiasm for the show held out longer than most but at this point... ehhh. I'm officially bored with it and will finish it up only because I've invested so much time already. Are they still doing a second season? Who's going to watch it?

Mad Men much less boring than Treme imo.

also: actually good

"boring" is carrying a lot of weight in this sentence but, i can't think of a more boring show than treme tbh

man men seems fun

dont really get ppl who find mad men boring

poll

treme is not exactly the show you're going to lend a box set to your friend on a friday, he's going to finish it on saturday afternoon, and then he's going to tell you how great it was on monday and ask when the next season starts and if you can torrent episodes for him and put them on a USB stick.

lovin' this show.

SO pumped that DirecTv will be showing The Wire this summer on their 101 Channel. I actually enjoy Treme while I am watching it, but I don't spend the week anticipating the next episode.

made it through episode 5, we didn't make the cut in the second line scene but you can hear me playing tambourine

wow. nobody even bothered to bump after the finale. RIP Simon.

Simon interview postmortem season 1

don't think anyone even bumped for the penultimate

i haven't seen 'justified' yet and im kind of wondering if i'll ever get round to this. no1 seems to really rep hard for it.

I think it's great.

i'm enjoying it, but i'm so invested in the subject matter that i don't think i can be objective about its watchability

It's beautifully done for the most part. Despite all the complaints about people being Simon's mouthpieces, it's also very understated as well.

yeah, by the end I decided it was great, despite some its flaws, which really were the same as The Wire's. I thought the last two episodes were really great, and I hope it doesn't come back, because TV shows shouldn't always have to be entire series. 1 decent season that explores these characters, their music, their city, their storm, etc. The end.

already been renewed. got to tackle the schools and the return of crime etc

yeah, just read the interview.

happy if there's more David Morse. I love that guy.

should just use the 2nd season commission for a do over

http://www.ihasaids.com/upload/data/1276610097.gif

Surprised by the strong finish! This show moved so slowly, but I never shook the level of interest - where like a few people here also said - not a show I was dying to watch every week, but once I sat down to watch I was usually pretty hooked because of the generally high quality of the acting. I'll come back for next season, but I'm not sure if I'll bother week-to-week again or just wait for it to finish or for the DVD box set to come out. OTOH it might be even duller if I watch it in one go?

In particular I was impressed by the unusual device (for this show) of the long Katrina flashback during Daymo's funeral, felt ripped out of an Altman film - really effective and unexpected, since the show has avoided using flashbacks entirely.

Also I still have a certain amount of respect that the show wasn't as relentlessly negative as The Wire, which I loved on that show, but here there's a strong undercurrent of hope even when all the characters are put through hell. The show beginning and ending with a second line funeral, the Chief's family splitting up again and Janette's last great day in NO before flying out to NY were all done pretty well in servicing this theme.

Also: really glad they didn't go ahead with the violinist being brutally murdered as suspected by many people.

Reading that Simon interview, I have to wonder what the people complaining in the Lost thread accusing Lindelof and Cuse of condescending to unhappy fans would say about THIS guy, wow

Man, some of that is Simon at his most insufferable, i've never seen him this ridiculously defensive - and wrong, since the last episode sure as hell does not justify all the dull stretches or bad ideas in this season. And damn he's got some crazy NY jealousy going on.

Gonna skip that interview, then.

The show is a reflection of Janette's complaint in the penultimate ep - lots of moments, "not a life." Hardly a disaster or anything, and indeed lots of great moments, but I have a hard time seeing this reach the greatness levels once anticipated without some serious tweaking next season.

the interview is p.interesting I thought, worth a read even if it does suffer from some of the stuff nhex points out; might go and watch the last two eps having read it

Midway through last ep now; 2nd-to-last def. worth watching.

I really enjoyed the last few episodes. I didn't really feel like the SPOILER suicide was dramatically earned, but that was my only real quibble with the season at large. I think it's important that the second season go in a different direction, though. I'd like to see some new themes, fewer cameos. But I thought the cameos made sense for season 1, and none of them really felt forced. The celebrity chefs were uniformly terrible actors but it certainly made sense that they were in the episodes.

Agreed that Simon is working way too hard to defend the show - he's often a very combative interview in print. (On TV he seems completely mild and unassuming, oddly. Milch is the same no matter what the venue.) I accept his basic argument though, which is that the show is being judged and found wanting by the wrong standards.

The consensus seems to be (in the media as well as here I think) 'no drama, egregious cameos, characters as mouthpieces' but for me this show is totally gripping despite all those things being true. It's really refreshing to have a show in which the stakes aren't somebody going to jail, or somebody being shot, but someone successfully breaking up with their boyfriend, or managing to get some roofers to get something done, or dealing with a suddenly withdrawn spouse - which is much closer to the dramas of our lives as we experience them. I was really moved by the finale, fantastic stuff. It may be that like John from Cincinnati it departs too much from TV norms to survive much longer, but I'm really happy that I get treated to a whole second season. (The crime moving back into the city might give people more of what they expect from Simon and keep people around, hopefully.)

Love how cable TV's renaissance is starting to resemble '70s Hollywood, with the auteurs busting out indulgent, difficult flop follow-ups to their classics. Five Easy Pieces followed by King Of Marvin Gardens.

Ah hah ha, yeah, so true. Though I think Chase is just living off residuals and doesn't have much happening at the moment, right?

Chase is currently casting for his feature film last I heard, and also has a deal to do a mini-series with HBO after that.

haha i watched king of marvin gardens recently. almost unwatchable.

last episode was very good. wish the flashback wasn't as obviously cued. would be kind of awesome if you had to figure out gradually that we were back a year, just before katrina.

sad about the goodman character. melissa leo's reactions ripped my heart out. but i kind of figured that goodman was a one-season cameo sort of deal. he's got bigger stuff to do than series TV.

i thought there was some very smart stuff in that david simon interview, e.g.

"For me, I don't think people can tell the difference when they speak of plot between the notion of whether something is a plot that's progressing or whether they're having dramatic moments that are typical of television standard - which is to say, cop show, medical show, legal show, "West Wing," whatever, where the stakes are high. That's what people are saying."

i think people indeed are confusing "plot" with certain types of dramatic incident.

not that there aren't other terms on which to criticize the show.

every scene where there are extras or minor characters "reacting" to the major characters (dancing to music, john goodman's classroom, etc.) is just fucking cringeworthy. actually only agnieska holland (sp?) seems to be able to handle those scenes well. and there are a lot of them.

also this was very interesting, i thought:

One of the things that I found interesting about Batiste is that in the flashback, we see that before the storm, he was living what seemed to be a much less marginal life.

Yes. He was in mid-city, he had a car, he had his record collection. And he was probably content with that, and then he had to take a huge step backwards. And there's also no implication that he was living with Desiree at the time. She and the baby were someplace else. So he was a lot more fancy-free as a bachelor.

it's the only time you can really measure how much baptiste has lost in the storm. (including all his rare records. god damn. he should ask that japanese guy to replace them.)

yikes, nobody is watching this anymore huh?

just watched the finale today. still kinda sinking in, but i'm more indifferent to both the show's strengths and weaknesses than really passionate about either. the knowledge that there will be a 2nd season makes me optimistic about what directions they could take it in, though.