High Definition: Tremé Hits the Right Notes

Before the flood, I’d only spent a day in New Orleans. My friend Stephanie was working with Desire Street Ministries, and she showed me where she lived and worked in the 8th and 9th Wards. It was the best and worst of America in one place. It was the week of Mardi Gras, and I saw communities readying their immaculate floats among the stark poverty of the city’s toughest neighborhoods. The grandness of the funeral processions was only matched by their sobering frequency, as the children she worked with grew accustomed to sounds of gunfire at a young age.

When I returned two years after the flood, Stephanie hadn’t budged. Like all of her neighbors, she was forced to spend a few months outside the city, waiting for the water to recede and some sense of order to be restored. She was now married with a kid, but her family lived in the same shotgun house in the 8th. She served as tour guide as we once agian drove the streets of the 9th Ward, but this time the densely populated district was just a giant field, empty but for the paved grid and the occasional deserted house.

On that second trip, I saw more of New Orleans. I saw the Rebirth Brass Band at the Maple Leaf and sampled some of the city’s finer cuisine. Watching the trumpeters blow their cheeks out past their ears, I started to sense what was almost lost and why so many of its residents bristled at the many suggestions of TV pundits and politicians that New Orleans was just a failed experiment that needed to be abandoned.

David Simon captures that love for the New Orleans, which goes beyond any normal sort of civic pride, in his new TV series Tremé on HBO, set three months after Katrina. That passion is seen in the temper of Creighton Bernette, the college professor played by John Goodman, who tosses a microphone into the water when a British documentarian belittles the cultural richness of the Crescent City. It’s seen in the stubbornness of Albert Lambreaux (The Wire‘s Clarke Peters), a Mardi Gras Indian Chief who takes up residence in a bar when his own home is beyond repair. It’s seen in the indignation of local DJ avis McAlary (Steve Zahn) towards anything that encroaches on the purity of his New Orleans, a city of music.

And for proof that the city is worth saving, Simon gives us music as Exhibits A-Z. The series premiere starts with the first post-hurricane second-line march and ends with a funeral procession. We get music in the nightclubs, music on the radio, dancing on the streets. Rebirth co-founder Kermit Ruffins plays himself and plays his trumpet like it’s an extension of his soul. Elvis Costello guest stars. If it were an 80-minute music video, it would be worth it, but the story is a nice bonus.

This is David Simon, creator of the second best TV show of the decade, so the characters arrive quickly, and most are familiar faces. Joining Peters is Wire alum Wendell Pierce as a struggling trombonist, Khandi Alexander from The Corner as his ex-wife and Melissa Leo Homicide: Life on the Streets as a civil rights lawyer. The main players are all a little more respectable than the drug dealers who populated his previous shows.

But the most remarkable departure for the gritty realist Simon is the unavoidable sense of hope that pervades Tremé. Three months after Katrina, the city remained in ruins. The government proved itself inept at handling the magnitude of the crisis. Residents had lost everything—their homes, family members and all the world that they knew. But they’d survived the worst, and it was a time of renewal—maddeningly slow, hopelessly overwhelming renewal. The city’s struggles still remain today, and those struggles are ripe for exploration on screen. But the people of New Orleans all knew what the rest of the country didn’t quite get: the city needed to survive.