One of the exciting things about Treme is that even its creators, it seemed, didn’t know where the show would lead. That’s not because of laziness or a lack of creative visions, like with many other dramatic serials, but because its near-past setting meant that David Simons and company truly didn’t know the full direction of where New Orleans was headed. Treme began development in 2008, yet we’re already past that date in the show, and next week’s finale will feature Mardi Gras 2009. The immediate history of the city was already written, and the government’s scandalous mismanagement of Hurricane Katrina’s aftermath was well-known, but what shape would the city’s revival (or perhaps rebirth) truly take?
This has meant an odd structure for the series, a push-pull between progress and cycles that has tried to follow the history of New Orleans as best as possible. Its characters have always been larger-than-life, symbols for the city itself in all its myriad walks of life, so they’ve lived out these difficulties, this desire to move forward that’s always curtailed by insurmountable circumstances. Every time Davis, for instance, thinks he’d finally found his calling, his place within New Orleans music, something always goes wrong. Yet he continues moving forward nonetheless, and the cycles seem like they may finally have an end for him should he get his new club. We don’t know yet whether that’s the case, but it feels like it, in the same way that his relationship with Janette, which we know has been one cycle after another, may have finally found its grounding. I kept waiting for his neighbors to say the word “marriage,” and while they didn’t, it was clear that for the first time in Davis’ life that was finally on the table.
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