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Treme - the creators of The Wire look at life in New Orleans - S3 - Sundays on HBO

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C

Cornballer

Member
New episode tonight:
Poor Man's Paradise

Janette is attacked by crawfish ravioli; Terry survives an assault; LaDonna learns the meaning of the threatening gestures.
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Two more episodes this season including tonight.
 
MMaRsu

MMaRsu

Member
So having not seen anything from Treme, but I am a huge fan of The Wire, is this show on the same level?
 
G

Greg

Member
MMaRsu said:
So having not seen anything from Treme, but I am a huge fan of The Wire, is this show on the same level?
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I mean it in no disrespect to The Wire, but Treme is on its own level. Not that one show is better than the other, but Treme is so unique that I really can't compare it to anything else. I can see fans of The Wire checking it out and hating it (I love both), but it definitely deserves a chance.
 
B

BenjaminBirdie

Banned
Greg said:
I mean it in no disrespect to The Wire, but Treme is on its own level. Not that one show is better than the other, but Treme is so unique that I really can't compare it to anything else. I can see fans of The Wire checking it out and hating it (I love both), but it definitely deserves a chance.
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Personally I enjoy it more than The Wire because it's less soul crushingly bleak.
 
Z

Zabka

Member
I love the way the finales bring the characters together. There's no other show out there like it right now.
 
F

firehawk12

Subete no aware
Man, I'm glad there's one last season to wrap the show up. There's also a nice symmetry in that Sonny is the one the comes up this season while everyone else seemingly gets screwed.
 
B

Blackhead

Redarse
Cornballer said:
- Sepinwall's review
- Onion A|V Club review
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'Treme' explained: 'Tipitina'

A couple of points from the Sepinwall and AVClub reviews that I thought was off:
  • This finale is about closure using examples like Sonny. Simon himself brings up the Nation issue as a coda for the series. Personally I don't think the show needed to tie up loose ends. Life isn't like that, it just moves on...
  • Annie and Davis. First Davis fucked up, shouldn't have cheated, and I don't want to make excuses for him. On the other hand I think it's a bit too simplified as Davis neglecting Annie and the regretting that. Oh well
 
B

BenjaminBirdie

Banned
Even the slightest detail as to why there would have been a mistrial would have been nice, but overall, typically incredible. The echo of the shot where Annie first showed up on Davis' steps, my gawt.
 
C

Cornballer

Member
- Wired Magazine: David Simon on Treme, the CIA and Why TV Isn’t Journalism
David Simon would like people to watch his television shows, but he wouldn’t mind if they occasionally picked up a book.

It’s not that the man behind HBO dramas The Wire and Treme, which ends its third season Sunday, wants you to switch off his series, he just figures some familiarity with long-form storytelling might help people understand them.

“I think very few people are looking to long-form prose for their storytelling anymore in America,” Simon said in a recent interview with Wired. “Most of America has learned to assess the realities of the criminal justice system, for example, from watching cases evolve in 40 minutes of television on the Law & Order stuff or CSI — that is the preeminent standard for storytelling…. I’m searching for a much different audience, and whether it’s there or not is an open question.”

Finding an audience has always kind of been Simon’s biggest problem. Adored by critics, The Wire didn’t get great ratings and barely completed its five-season run. And it was recently announced that Treme’s fourth and final season would only be five episodes, instead of 10 — leaving Simon with a lot of storylines to tie up in his complex drama about the problems of rebuilding New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. But he’s determined to do it, because if there’s one thing David Simon will fight for, it’s completing a story once he’s started telling it.

With Season 3 coming to an end, Wired talked to the prolific Emmy winner and former Baltimore Sun reporter, who is currently filming Treme’s final run in New Orleans, about the end of the show, approaching a TV show like a journalistic endeavor even if its not journalism, and why he’d like his next project to be a show about the history of the CIA.
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B

Blackhead

Redarse
Really interesting links, thanks Cornb

Edit: really have to quote this part from the Wired link as I've been all doom and gloom about Simon's tv writing future
Wired: Do you have any idea what you’d like to do after Treme?

Simon: I have a few projects, but it’s not even worth talking about them because until they get the green light, you don’t know what’s going and what’s not. I know that I probably don’t want to talk [HBO] into anything they don’t want to do, because then it’s just harder to finish it. It’s a horrifying thing if you’re somebody who is interested in a story as a complete entity, with a beginning, a middle and an end…. We’re getting out of Treme by the skin of our ass, and we got out of The Wire by the skin of our ass. It’s exhausting, it’s debilitating. I don’t know that it can be avoided because this is television and what are you going to do? You must assume some risk at the beginning when you start a story. But I’d rather assume less risk than more. I’d rather at least start with a premise they’re fully committed to. But in some ways it’s about us coming up with some ideas and saying, “Do you like any of these?” At the same time I don’t want to walk into the office and say, “Tell me what you want to show and I’ll go do it” because I don’t want to tell a story I’m not interested in.

Wired: If you were to get a new show, any idea what you’d like to focus on, what world you’d like to explore?

Simon: I would love to do a history of the CIA from the end of World War II, when it was the OSS, on. I think there’s a lot to be said about America’s foreign policy footprint and who we are in the world and what the rest of the world has gleaned from us that is worthy, and what it has gleaned from us that is not. We have profoundly influenced the second half of the 20th century and beyond. The forces that we set into motion after World War II, I don’t think most Americans know their own history. Or they only know the version of their history is kind of compartmentalized…. I would love to do that piece.

I’m also looking at a piece that involves Manhattan in the 1970s. Midtown Manhattan. There’s a couple miniseries floating around there. Whatever it is, it has to have legs so that it’s not just about what it’s about, you know?
“I’m not particularly interested in porn as porn, but I’m fascinated by the allegory for capitalism.”

Wired: It has to prove a point.

Simon: Right. One of the stories we’re interested in is … when pornography came out of the closet in the 1970s and the middle of Manhattan became this porn emporium. I’m not particularly interested in porn as porn, but I’m fascinated by the allegory for capitalism. The idea of product and this moment at which a product went from being impermissible and under-the-counter to overt and taking up real estate in the largest American city. And then this moment when the real estate became utterly expendable, because the product changed and everything went to home video. Then everybody who had seized on the physical plant — including the mob, and politicians, and real estate — at some point it all transpired to Disney. It’s a remarkable allegory for venture capitalism.
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hope for tomorrow :)
 
C

Crimson Clown

Member
What a great finale, somehow I love this show more and more by the end of each season.

Good to hear there's hope of Simon returning to TV after this wraps.
 
C

CrankyJay

Banned
Cornballer said:
Great finale. Will be interesting to see how they structure the 5-episode S4 since the show is typically a slow burn. I'm wondering when they'll pick things up, too.
Thanks - I forgot to post that last night.
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Wait what? The show gets 5 more episodes then its done forever?

I wanted to pinch Feeney, that smug prick.

lol'd when LP said he was coming to Buffalo. There was a series of mysterious deaths at our county jail, more dirty cop shit where nothing was proven.
 
C

Cornballer

Member
- NY Magazine: Matt Zoller Seitz Takes the David Simon Challenge and Reviews Treme Season Three As a Whole
This article is the conclusion of a critical experiment. For the first time in years, I watched an entire season of a David Simon series — Treme, season three — without writing about it while the show was in progress. I did this because of Simon’s much-debated insistence that the TV recap culture prizes the parts over the whole and does a disservice to shows that are meant to be considered in totality, like a novel. “If television reviews could be done at the end of each season, they could say more and do more,” he told my fellow TV critic Alan Sepinwall.

Was he right? I hope so. Here goes.
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Much more via the link.
 
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