Treme (TV Milestones Series) by Jaimey Fisher (review)

In Treme, a compact, critical guide to the David Simon and Eric Overmeyer-helmed HBO series of the same name (2010-2013), Jaimey Fisher explores how this underrated series depicts post-Katrina New Orleans through original, inventive techniques. Part of Wayne State University's TV Milestones series, Treme examines the series through the lenses of networked narrative, cultural production, criminal justice, disaster capitalism, and the "counter-publics" of New Orleans. In contrast with other scholarly or journalistic treatments of Treme, Fisher's volume goes beyond now-shopworn arguments about whether the series depicts New Orleans from a touristic, "outsider's" perspective—a David Simoncentric contention that quickly falls apart when one notes the large amount of local involvement in the production. Instead, Fisher examines Treme from the perspective of how it differs from other "prestige" television series of the early 2000s by dispensing with genre convention altogether. He notes that the series stands out for its prominent female characters and as the only prestige television series with a black protagonist, even though Antoine Batiste (Wendell Pierce) is the series' protagonist in only the loosest sense of term (5). In this short but detailed analysis of Treme, Fisher examines the series as an outlier in the "prestige television" landscape and critically investigates how it depicts a city recovering from trauma and rebuilding.

Fisher begins the book by introducing twin concepts that ground his analysis: the "noconcept narrative" and "networked narrative." With the former, he refers to Treme's rejection of traditional television plotlines and generic tropes, such as The Wire's narcotics investigation narrative, in favor of a meandering, "slice of life" depiction of New Orleans—in layman's terms, it is, like Seinfeld, a "show about nothing." For him, Treme, with its "emphatic rejection of television genre…functions as a kind of counter-public, at odds not only with television's standard generic fare but even with the sort of widely praised genre variations in The Wire" (115). This is one of Fisher's most convincing arguments and helps his analysis go beyond that of other works on the series, which tend to focus on its depictions of New Orleans culture. The series' muted critical reception was in part due to puzzlement at a seemingly aimless follow-up to The Wire, which explored Baltimore through the lenses of the War on Drugs, education, politics, and the media.

The networked narrative concept refers to the show's use of an ensemble cast of characters in order to depict the city of New Orleans as its main character, as opposed to focusing on a troubled male antihero, common to other "prestige TV" series such as Mad Men, The Sopranos, and Breaking Bad. Treme combines the networked narrative method of storytelling (which Simon initially employed in The Wire) with a strong emphasis on montage in order to draw disparate characters into a larger, more collective story. Fisher traces Treme's networked narrative style and its use of montage to urban crime films including Fritz Lang's M (1931) and argues that these techniques prove especially valuable for a film or series' "social engagement," that is, they help viewers think about systems, not just individual characters (16-17). Most valuable for readers of this journal are the intriguing possibilities such a networked narrative depiction could offer other historical television series. Also pioneered by other recent HBO fare such as High Maintenance, network narratives could offer historical drama series the possibility of moving beyond great man/woman storylines, as well as depicting urban environments through diverse viewpoints in order to interweave the stories of individual characters with larger, more system-level narratives. In short, Fisher argues that Treme's use of networked narrative strategies combined with montage allow the series to constantly shift scale in order to illustrate just how New Orleans both suffered from and dealt with the fallout of Katrina at various societal levels, whether in the city's music and food scenes, failing criminal justice, housing and educational systems...