Dark Brown Waffles

Last season, I recapped every episode, and wrote a considerable amount about the Treme’s critics and Creighton Burnette’s suicide. If you search the internet for any of that today, you won’t find it, because in a predictable fit of mine, I changed blogging platforms and deleted all of my old content. Is this a huge loss? Of course not. But the arguments I made last year are gone so I feel the need to recap the following details:

-I am not from New Orleans. My connection to the city is tenuous at best. My father wrote a book about a musician from New Orleans (Don Albert) and consequently, we were there on a semi-regular basis, he more than me. We also grew up with friends from New Orleans, ex-pats who ended up (stranded) in West Virginia.

-I do not criticize the show as an insider, obviously. My focus is how the show itself works, and not necessary how closely it mirrors the experience of New Orleanians post-Katrina. I can’t tell you if the show is getting the beignets and the music wrong; I can tell you from my perspective if a character like Creighton Burnette is a selfish jerkoff (a very contentious position I discovered).

-I do every episode by breaking out The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly. The Ugly section is reserved for outliers to the first two sections; I’m not biasing against the show by having two sections for criticism. Let’s go:

The Good

-It was good having Antoine back. His performance at Tipitina’s was other-worldly, including the little jig he danced. (It reminded me for not particular reason of the Governor’s unexpected dance at the end of O Brother Where Art Thou?) His interactions with Desiree were just as fraught as they were last season, even if the two of them do seem to understand that they’re barely tolerating the other one, both for each other and for their baby. The scene in which the two of them find the scrapbook was heartbreaking, and their conversation about finding the property’s deed was fantastic. It’s good to have Antoine back in our life.

-If somebody said to me, “I’d think the scenes with the boy learning the trumpet,” were incredibly heavy-handed, I couldn’t argue, but I still thought that his scenes were the best of the show’s opening 15 minutes. It was a bit harder to stomach the idea that he was downtown at a murder scene late at night. Still, his march by the graveyard while Albert worked on the grave? That was beautiful.

-We’re going to get to the problem with it later, but it was good to see Albert Lambreaux too, even if he was getting kicking out of the bar that he’d barely put back together. The idea that he’s going to try to make his old home livable again (the same home that was barely survivable during the first episode last season) is daunting to imagine.

-Finally, it was good to see a more fleshed out Terry Colson (the police officer played by David Morse). I may be forgetting something but last season’s depiction of government was almost always distant, strained, and boogeymanish. That’s not to say those depictions were wrong. Surely though there were local government officials who weren’t any of those things, New Orleanians who wanted to contribute from their own professional positions. Colson’s character was as close as we got; the more we get of him (and his anger toward presumptuous New York Times reporters), the better.

-Finally, LaDonna. She’s an anchor though. An absolute anchor.

The Bad

-It strains credulity to imagine that Sofia (Creighton’s daughter) hasn’t figured out that her father committed suicide, as Toni (Creighton’s wife and Sophia’s mother) told Terry. Unless, of course, that was the official story. Perhaps Colson handled it that was a favor for Toni? That said, the Sophia storyline - that she’s grieving for her father by becoming her father - was…forced. At least, it felt forced in the first episode, as if the writers had killed off Creighton and then realized they need an angry voice for the second season.

-Sonny’s back, but you’ll notice that I put that under The Bad because he was an entirely uninteresting character in the first season and frankly, nothing’s changed one episode into the second. What is he contributing to the show?

-Where there’s Sonny, there’s inexplicably Annie, his ex-girlfriend, supremely talented, and inexplicably still happily playing music with the guy who punched her in the face. Yes, victims find a way to justify what happens, but Annie goes from a victimized busker to a supremely successful touring musician and still finds a way to forgive Sonny’s violence and drug use? And not only forgives it, but puts Davis in a position where he talks to Sonny in a friendly if uncomfortable way? Maybe we’re supposed to see Annie’s apparent tolerance/friendship with Sonny as a metaphor for the relationship of New Orleanians to their city but that hardly justifies it.

-Arnie’s cousin Nelson has plot mechanism written all over him. As far as we knew, Arnie came to New Orleans looking to help, but Nelson said that Arnie had sold him on the city because there was money to be made everywhere. That’s out of character for the Arnie we had come to know. Then there’s Nelson’s interaction with the banker, a man who came up just short of donning a Klansman’s robes for the conversation. You’d have a hard time describing anything that happened with Nelson as subtle.

-Anthony Bourdain wrote the kitchen scenes for last night’s episodes. He has famously made the case that the restaurant industry is incredibly reliant on immigrant labor. Yet last night’s kitchen featured what appeared to be an entirely white staff. Maybe New York City kitchens have abandoned the immigrants for the cooking school graduates but in a show that prides itself on authentic depictions of everything, that reeked to high heaven. (Also, Janette’s living with Ziggy? I figured he was still locked up.)

The Ugly

-This almost certainly isn’t what the show’s writers were intending when they wrote it, but I took Delmond’s argument with the jazz aficionados to be a display of the insider/outsider scenario that occurred with Treme’s critics. You had the outsiders (the aficionados) criticizing the musical scene from their own outsider perspective; they’re not wedded to the music by anything more personal than their own biases, which play themselves out when they casually drop words like “minstrel” into their analysis. And Delmond (the insider) is obviously entirely biased by his own personal connection to the city: its music, its people, its history. To hear an outsider dismiss its current state so thoroughly and so casually brings out the more protective side of him (something which he essentially admits when he says, “I’m allowed to say those things.”) Essentially, you had two sides talking directly past one another because for each, the music meant an entirely different thing.

The same thing happened last year with the show’s critics. Plenty of outsiders were complaining that the show was too New Orleans-y, which was their very awkward way of saying that the show wasn’t talking specifically to them and their needs. That’s a perfectly justifiable reason to criticize something, because without a personal connection on some level, the enjoyment of anything becomes strained. (You can tell me that The Sopranos was a great show but I’ll be damned if I see it there, likely owing at least in part to my utter disinterest in the mafia, New Jersey, etc.) The insiders were playing Delmond’s role, saying “Fuck y’all” to those critics because they were hearing a dismissal of their lives and the things that were important to them. Both sides can simultaneously be right and yet never agree to it.

-I say this as a fan who’s love for the show has largely disappeared from the place where I originally put it: last night’s show was about as disappointing a beginning as one can possibly imagine. I’m on board for the whole season because I love most of the characters (Sonny and Annie notwithstanding) but I’ll be damned if I came away from that one particular episode invested. I muttered to my wife, 15 minutes in, “This is as bad as they could have produced,” and then thought to myself that the critics were going to have a field day crowing about how everything they’d ever objected to was on display last night.

At least part of that is the fact that the show started out last night like it did during its initial premier: Albert’s looking for a home, Antoine’s looking for life, Davis is still infuriating his bosses at a (the?) radio station, Annie’s still making bad decisions, Janette is still unhappy, Delmond’s still away from town, etc. Part of that is very, very real: people’s lives just don’t kick into high gear after a tragic natural disaster and an inconceivably idiotic formal response to a natural disaster. For a television, the reality is that it felt very much like the start of the second season invalidated much of the first season. That will change, but for one night, it was awfully disappointing.