For all of its sprawling nature, by necessity certain characters take center stage in Treme, and how much you enjoy an episode is of course greatly affected by how much you like them. And for that reason, Treme has always been a bit more mixed to me than The Wire, in which pretty much every role speaks to me in some way. Sonny has gone through a huge arc since we first met him in season one, but he still doesn’t have much personality, and his stories tend to be so pat and easy to predict that it’s hard not to sigh whenever he comes onscreen.
Sonny doesn’t overwhelm “Careless Love,” but he’s the only one whose story isn’t just developing; it’s going through major shifts and sets the tone for everything else. But Sonny’s story of bottoming out, missing work and having sex with a stripper is exactly what we’d expect to see from him, and while sad to watch, it’s not revelatory. I do care much more for Sonny than I did when he was abusing Annie, certainly, but I also know the beats, and for all the great acting and directing of his sequences, they largely just rolled off me. His story of redemption is important to Treme thematically, but I feel like the show just hasn’t been able to pull it off.
Fortunately this was the only part of the episode that really stumbled, and even the ongoing investigation managed to pique some of my interest—they found people who were willing to testify, so the repetition we’ve had since season one may finally be winding down. That’s long been my main frustration with Treme, that for various reasons good and bad the show gets same-y. This has been the problem with Nelson this season. Last season he was a mover and shaker; this season he’s just been mired in frustration at New Orleans, so we’ve had half a dozen episodes of his stagnation.