Abstract
Treme debuted on the U.S. cable subscription channel HBO on April 11, 2010. Named after the pre–Civil War neighborhood with the largest community of free people of color in the Deep South, the New Orleans–based series self-consciously ventures into the contemporary culture left after hurricane Katrina flood waters receded in late 2005. Despite lackluster ratings, the affective love letter written by celebrity producers David Simon and Eric Overmyer (of The Wire fame) has been received by media scholars internationally. Here are some of their responses.
The articles in this issue are based on presentations given at the 2011 Society for Cinema and Media Studies annual conference, where I was surprised to see so many panels on the series. The authors here have illuminated the aesthetic, cultural, and political economic issues that make the series an important barometer for the continuing role of television in connecting the specifics of a place and its peoples to national discussions about disasters and recoveries, art and auteurs, poverty, and intersecting ’isms. I invited Herman Gray to comment on these strands, as he had a decade earlier with Frank’s Place, another television series that refracted the national through the prisms of a local place. I thank him for his long-ranging insights and perspectives.
My own experiences of the series, much like the crises that precipitated it, have been at a much closer range. Treme has impacted the city where I live nearly as much as any of the other harbingers of “recovery” that have frequented my neighborhood since 2006. In its first three years, Treme crews have occupied more public space than any other film production in the city. As a percentage based on days and the intensity of usage, Treme ranks first according to public records. 1 These privatizations generally include police details, arranged through a shady “check-writing service” that was ironically staged through the program itself (McCarthy 2011). Amid the shortages of decent employment and affordable housing, Treme has been present. The musicians get paid on-set, receive charity benefits off-set, and a few more locals have work thanks to a film industry jobs training course. Those lucky enough to host the most mobile crews have seen steady rents and a housing sales boom that has bucked the freefall in other cities (Mowbray 2010). At the same time, Treme is part of the film economy that generates the creative precariat (Standing 2011) and maintains a post-Katrina housing bubble that outprices the majority of residents. The production company for Treme Fee Nah Nee in 2010 received nearly $10 million in tradable state tax credits, 2 exactly the amount to be cut from the Louisiana social service programs aimed at needy families (Moller 2010). Knowing we swim in the same fishbowl with this production, I invited the founder of the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN) Wade Rathke to give his take on the series. I thank him for his critique from the heart and his standpoint as a visionary activist for the city.