Television & New Media

This article compares the HBO series Treme to an earlier television series that was also set in the Tremé neighborhood—Frank’s Place. I suggest that whereas for Frank’s Place, media scholars’ emphasis on the show’s representational practices of race and place was entirely appropriate, these questions are not sufficient to make sense of Treme. The latter enjoins media scholars to ask a different set of questions that examine both the show’s practices within the city as well as the city’s practices that implicate the show. Specifically, I suggest that the show requires an analysis of labor and hiring practices, tourism, and corporate social responsibility in the city. In so doing, I propose considering Treme not in terms of its representational practices, but rather, as a set of spatial practices bound up with the material production of city space as well as its citizen-subjects.

Occupying the space between cultural reproduction and theatrical production, the HBO series Treme offers an important vantage point from which to analyze the intersection of race, class, culture, and media representation animating New Orleans’s post-Katrina tourist identity. Treme illustrates the tension between the welcome recognition and celebration of New Orleans black expressive culture and its spectacularization and commodification. The resuscitation of tourist tropes and an emphasis on jazz and heritage music in the series often render the city’s history of racial conflict and injustice invisible or subordinate to new narratives of cross-racial unity among Katrina survivors and paternalistic actions by white characters uniquely positioned to express the community’s outrage. Treme takes up where the disaster tour leaves off, giving viewers - televisual tourists - access to purportedly authentic places, people, events, and experiences that exist beyond the tourist landscape and that suggest a racial remapping of the city.

This article argues that David Simon’s HBO series Treme engages with scholarly debates about the historical narratives of the New Orleans jazz tradition by suggesting that there is not one authentic narrative but instead many conflicting narratives. Through the characters of Antoine Batiste, Delmond Lambreaux, Davis McAlary, and Sonny and Annie, Treme questions how race and class segregation and the outsider tourist consumption of New Orleans music have affected the production and perceptions of jazz. Through these complex depictions that are both fictionalized and historicized, I argue that Treme meditates on the overall nature of authenticity as both pluralistic and subjective, while creating television performances that offer meaningful commentary about social and political narratives in post-Katrina New Orleans.

This commentary focuses on how the HBO series Treme establishes its credibility about place through the role of the outsider. Treme, through its explicit attention to place-based detail, creates a sense of authenticity that is both maintained and challenged by exchanges between those who are from here and those who come here.

The character of Creighton Bernette on the HBO series Treme, in his excesses and abjection, embodies post-Katrina New Orleans in crucial ways: physical and emotional excesses become ways to distance his character from viewers, in ways analogous to the othering of the city and its inhabitants in post-Katrina media and public discourses.

As enjoyable as it is for New Orleans to get some of the glitz and get of all star attention, sadly HBO’s Treme is a sanitized tourist version of the city and its people with an appealing soundtrack. The heart of the citizen struggle to rebuild and recover by creating enough power to save their communities, create livelihoods, protect their families, and advance centuries of unique culture is largely lost and missing in the caricature of Treme.

This article explores the role of scripted cable television in the making and remaking of place in the conjuncture of postdisaster crisis and the neoliberal transformation of urban space. I suggest that Treme contributes to the remaking of New Orleans by engaging conceptions of authenticity, dwelling on the elements of cuisine, music, and diversity that mark New Orleans as distinctive, and highlighting individual enterprise as a condition of possibility for remaking post-Katrina New Orleans. I also suggest that because it makes for compelling quality television and provides badly needed publicity and temporary economic stimulus for the local economy, Treme, the show and the HBO production, through no fault of its own, displaces critical engagement with public policy choices and state-centered redress for economic, cultural, and social injustice and inequality.