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"FacebookPinterest\n\nSuppose you live in New Orleans, which I do. Suppose that\u2014partly as a result, admittedly\u2014you cherish David Simon's Treme. In that case, watching the show limp toward the exits this month without the culture at large particularly giving two hoots has a melancholy side and then some.\n\nRemember, when it premiered in 2010, Treme was one heck of a gamble: Simon's bid to create an even richer social, political, and human canvas than he had in The Wire, but minus the insurance of an inner-city cops-and-gangstas plotline to provide guaranteed focus and momentum. No less dicey, the series wasn't just defiantly local-minded\u2014in-jokes, cameos by everyone from music-scene fixture Kermit Ruffins to disgraced former City Councilman Oliver Thomas as themselves\u2014but openly out to celebrate the uniqueness of New Orleans and the city's survival/renewal after Katrina. The risk was that audiences not already sold on the place's motley glories would feel excluded and ticked off about it instead of drawn in, fascinated, and vicariously welcomed.\n\nAnd it didn't work. Not when it came to grabbing or retaining viewers, not when it came to the bagful-of-Emmys prestige or critical adulation HBO loves. My own early-bird take on the first season was definitely infatuated, but by season's end, my then GQ colleague Sean Fennessey had penned an expert dismantling called \"Why Treme Failed\"\u2014and note that past tense. Soon afterward, a phone chat with another pop-culture wallah who prides himself on keeping his ear to the ground\u2014and who was genuinely nonplussed to hear I still liked the show\u2014made it plain that Fennessey's pan was already the conventional wisdom among TV eggheads. Having duly sampled Treme, because of David Simon, the brainy kids' party bus was already on its way somewhere else.\n\nWe holdouts felt a mite forlorn. By the second season, viewership was down to around half a mil, pretty dismal even by boutique-TV standards\u2014and it's perfectly possible that around a third of that crowd lived within the city limits, or at least had once. The fact is, I don't know a single person who stuck with Treme who wasn't either a New Orleanian or else using the show for a long-distance New Orleans fix. HBO might very well not have okayed a third season, let alone the truncated (five episodes) fourth one now unspooling to cricket noises, if Simon weren't someone they want to stay on good terms with down the road.\n\nThe disconnect was that, in the city where it was set\u2014and despite some early suspicion that La-la-Land was going to eff things up again\u2014Treme was godhead. Only Saints games were more ubiquitous on bar TVs. The Times-Picayune ran so much excited flapdoople about every bit of local trivia embedded in the show that it sometimes seemed as if the paper's TV reviewer was actually its Treme reviewer. Not only cast members like Wire alum Wendell Pierce, a/k/a horn player Antoine Batiste, but behind-the-scenes types like story editor (and onetime Times-Pic reporter) Lolis Eric Elie were figures of awe. This year, Elie even published a Treme cookbook, written in the voices of the series's characters\u2014and once the show is off the air, my signed copy will make a dandy souvenir.\n\nSo I couldn't help being curious to notice that, even inside New Orleans, nobody I knew could get it up to act all that excited about Treme's final mini-season. Son of a gun\u2014had we moved on, too? It sure felt that way, and I was no exception. The preview discs from HBO sat around my house for days before I felt obliged to plug 'em in. Then I found myself watching with newly objective eyes, meaning I could finally see how what had seemed so special to NOLA residents had been a little too special for everybody else.\n\nFirst off, that the December 1 premiere ep was set on the night of Barack Obama's 2008 election victory struck me as more than a little corny\u2014meaning not only sentimental, always the show's inherent vice, but too much of the same-old same-old (what, Kermit again?) in depicting both black New Orleans's and white-liberal New Orleans's euphoria. As Treme's huge gallery of characters got re-introduced in flitting little scene after flitting little scene, I realized how difficult it would be for anyone without a major prior investment in their fates to understand why these random-looking incidents were of any consequence. The flaw Fennessey homed in on back in 2010\u2014there isn't enough connectivity between these people's stories\u2014was more apparent to me than ever.\n\nSo far as binding agents go, Treme has never fully recovered from the loss of John Goodman as Tulane prof-cum-novelist Creighton Bernette, who offed himself in a bout of post-Katrina despondency at the first season's end. That isn't only because Goodman was characteristically imposing, not to mention a recognizable enough (white) star to give the show an anchor for non-African-American viewers and New Orleans ignorami alike. Ultra-articulate, ramblingly and rumblingly pissed-off Bernette was the ideal mouthpiece for Simon's themes, able to voice the ramifications for New Orleans writ large of everybody else's story arcs.\n\nThat job has since fallen to Steve Zahn as DJ/musician/all-purpose gadfly Davis McAlary, but it doesn't help that McAlary was conceived to be susceptible, often fatuous, and generally annoying. (He's based on real-life born dilettante Davis Rogan, incidentally a much better piano player than his screen stand-in\u2014and yes, it's a little cutesy that Rogan now plays a member of McAlary's band, at least if you're in the tiny minority of people who know who Rogan is.) McAlary just doesn't have the authority to win viewers over to seeing how Pierce's trombone player, Kim Dickens's harried chef, Clarke Peters's Mardi Gras Indian chief, Khandi Alexander's bar owner, Lucia Micarelli's street violinist turned budding star, Melissa Leo's crusading lawyer and David Morse's beleaguered cop all fit together in Simon's mosaic.\n\nSomething else this season has gotten me to admit is that Treme is too elegant for its own good\u2014that is, not nearly rowdy enough. ABC's forthrightly soapy Nashville may be a commercial vulgarization of Simon's concept in almost every way, but it's also proof that commercial vulgarization has its upsides in flavorfulness and quick-fix appeal. Sooner or later, pursuing capital-G and capital-A Great Art at entertainment's expense is sure to disenchant me, and cable TV's surfeit of it in recent years has gotten overweening. If that's not wholly Simon's fault, it's still at once perversely enjoyable and kind of snotty that this season of Treme\u2014and much of its third season, too\u2014is clearly designed for insiders only. Nobody who isn't already hooked will be able to find a way in or feel much desire to.\n\nWith all that said, my hunch is still that Treme will eventually be recognized as not only a bold experiment but\u2014in artistic, not commercial, terms\u2014a mostly successful one. Over-elegant or not, it's one of the best portraits of any American city ever put on film, and a good many of the show's characters\u2014Goodman's, Alexander's, Pierce's, and even Zahn's, just for starters\u2014are both definitive and permanently memorable. I'm even surer of that now that Treme's strictly provincial jollies have largely faded for me; I mean, a guy can only yelp, \"Omigod I've been in that bar!\" so many times before the novelty wears off. Even so, one reason I got into pop culture to begin with was that it's supposed to be, ahem, popular. Treme's restricted appeal is some kind of benchmark of how\u2014on TV, of all places\u2014that's now all but irrelevant to some of the most talented people at work in what used to be the ultimate pop medium."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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