The Nature of Things

Treme  returned to the HBO schedule last night, giving me a new reason to look forward to Sunday night television. This is the show's third season, and it was announced today that its fourth half-season will be its last . This David Simon show about New Orleans in the aftermath of the tragedy of Hurricane Katrina has never gained the viewership of HBO's most popular series such as The Sopranos or Game of Thrones, so I guess, in a way, it will be lucky to last three-and-a-half seasons, but, as one who has come to love the series, I see its short run as a shame and just another indictment of the taste of the American television viewing public. I admit that it took me a while to get into it also. It's a show with a lot of different and very diverse characters. The story lines attempt to do justice to each of them and so we get lots of scenes of just a minute or so of exposition for each story as the camera jumps back and forth among the characters. I think it is easier for...

I didn't watch the first season of " Treme" on HBO last year, but my family did, and they kept nagging and nagging me, telling me how great it was and how much I would love it until, as the second season of the show was looming, I gave in and took to HBO On Demand and watched all ten episodes of the first season in just a few days. All things considered, I think I was smart to view it this way. I'm not really much of a television junkie and I can't claim to have watched other David Simon series like "The Wire" or "Homicide" so I came to "Treme" as a Simon-virgin, so to speak. Having now watched the first season and the first episode of the second season, I might want to go back and look at some of his earlier work. "The Wire" springs immediately to mind. For the uninitiated, "Treme" is set in New Orleans. The first season's episodes begin three to four months after Katrina. The city is in ruins. So are t...