I have finished watching Season 1 of the David Simon show, Treme. Simon is the creator and a writer of my favourite show ever, The Wire. His current show, Treme, does not disappoint either. It follows the city of New Orleans, post Hurricane Katrina.

I love Simon’s style. He writes in a way that captures the deeply intertwined and dependent nature of real life, coming at a topic from the angle of many different characters, while also varying the “level” of the perspective. If he were to write a television show about baseball, he would spend an entire season each, from the perspective of good players, crappy players, managers, and general managers. As he would move on in the seasons, he would keep characters from the previous seasons so that we can see how the decisions at the higher levels affects the lower levels, and vice versa. It becomes this layered gigantic puzzle, where there are a hundred characters all intertwined.

Somehow Simon has a way of demonstrating how messed up the world is without exercising any viewer’s adrenaline. You do not get the standard, “something good happens”, then “something bad happens”, then “something good happens”, etc.. in a non-stop cycle of ridiculousness. It does not feel as though you are being “had” as a viewer, by taking the easy route to establishing a story line, through layers of coincidence. When you watch his shows at first, the things you expect to happen next usually don’t, because we’ve been trained to expect rare coincidences in television. If there is a 1 in 100 chance of something happening in real life, it is sure to happen on most television shows. The nemesis will walk in that door at the worst possible time. On a David Simon show, it won’t happen 99 times out of 100. It’s refreshing. Life is certainly complex and layered enough to cut out the coincidences, although it takes more effort and time, and is more common to books than television.

On Treme, music plays an important part, as it does in New Orleans. It’s full of live performances (and like the Wire, zero background music). The musicians are largely not actors, but real musicians playing themselves in this show. So let’s see, a David Simon show, that focuses on music.. Safe to say, it’s currently my favourite show.

Here’s one of the real artists featured on the show, Professor Longhair.