Treme
My first pass through this series this weekend moves the first season of Treme toward the top of my list of favorite entertainments, for all of the reasons enumerated elsewhere:
- Powerful, ringing, ferocious performances by a brilliant ensemble cast;
- Vibrant, engaging music created and performed with an authenticity that comes directly from and goes directly to the heart;
- An intimate immersion in the soul of a profoundly alien culture;
- Interlocking stories about interlocking, deeply-engaging people, woven from miniature realities that encapsularize and vivify enormous, abidingly-human, irresolute real problems…
My first pass through the first season of Treme has generated an insatiable, immediate hankering for one hell of a whole lot more! I recognize in myself a degree of need I haven’t felt since discovering-and-losing Firefly — which, upon reflection, I realize was ABOUT things, like;
- the intimate presentation of the personal lives of people caught in the negligent and incompetent machineries of a corrupt and interfering complex of bureaucracies;
- the literal preservation/restoration/creation of Traditional American Values in absolute spite of the obscene abuses that subverted phrase has been used to justify;
- and We, The fuckin’ People, Jack.
I’ve always suspected that the continuing mission of the tramp freighter, Serenity, a vessel desperately dedicated to enterprise, was to boldly go (with fathomless stores of humor and character) to explore the future of inequality in sex, finance, influence and race; projecting present-day pathologies forward through centuries of morally-degenerate tomorrows. And I truly believe that in Treme, I’ve found the logical/emotional/spiritual successor to Firefly. It’s primary interest is in (its and us) people; leaving ratings, political correctness, sociopolitical issues and universal popularity to sort themselves out in the fullness of time. Or not. I love these show. They nourish conscience (by example).
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