The Antisocial Socialist

While Treme is now only the second-best thing on TV (thanks to Breaking Bad being so good, not because its quality has gone down), you really should be watching it if you're not already. Here's the third season trailer:



Just finished watching the third season and it has given me all the feels and now I'm going to blather on about it in an effort to get you to watch. Or, better yet, starting a longer thread than the one I started on FB.

For those who have no idea what I'm on about at all, Treme is set in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina and is written by the guys who did The Wire, but is strangely less depressing than The Wire. Mostly. This season takes place in 2007, just over two years after the storm. Relief money has flooded into the city, but corruption is rampant. Crime is still on the rise. Developers are looking for an opportunity to profit from the city's tragedy and remake New Orleans as a playground for tourists while expelling its mainly poor, mainly black original residents.



Things I loved

So much. I don't know where to start.

Let's start with Antoine, the closest thing the show has to a main character. When last we saw him, he finally caved to financial necessity and got a real job, coaching the marching band at his wife Desiree's school. If you guessed that this is my absolute favourite plot line of the season, you'd be right. He ends up bonding with a teenage girl who, while musically promising, has never learned to read. Through them, the story of the public school system in New Orleans, a test case for the Shock Doctrine, unfolds. It's heartwrenching and uplifting all at the same time.

I'd been hoping that Desiree would get a storyline of her own since season 1, and it finally happened this season. After her mother's house is torn down (her mother was forced to abandon it after the storm, but planned to renovate and return at some point), she hooks up with a bunch of community activists and bloggers documenting civic corruption. Watching Desiree raise hell is fantastic, and watching her relationship with Antoine evolve as they both come into their own ("Don't get arrested at the protest, dear") is excellent.

I hated LaDonna's plot last season—she's my favourite character, and I think Khandi Alexander is the best actor on the show—so it was nice that this season's plot was slightly less horrifying. Slightly. Circumstances force her to move in with her bore of a husband's snooty family, and she actually gets some comedic moments out of it, which is good. And then in the second half of the season she's back to dealing with the trial of her rapists, and their friends intimidating her, and it would be completely awful were it not for the fact that her storyline after three seasons finally collides with Albert, my second-favourite character. And they hit it off. Possibly romantically. I actually made noises at the screen. Happy, happy noises.

Albert's plot completely depressed the shit out of me but it was really good. I've been convinced they were going to kill him off every season, and now he has cancer. There's an easy story in there, where the old radical passes the torch to his prodigal son, but they keep subverting that because both Albert and Delmond are more complicated than that. Delmond gets involved with a seemingly altruistic development project that makes all the right noises about involving the community, running up against his father's cynicism and relatively extreme politics, and to my utter joy, Albert gets to be right.

Loved the new characters. Louis, a grad student, aspiring investigative journalist and dorky metalhead, is awesome. I was sad to see him go in the last episode, but I was so convinced that he was going to be killed off that it was nice to see him get on a plane and away from the NOPD. I'm not sure if the FBI guy was in previous seasons—I feel like he might have been in one or two episodes—but I really liked him too.

Janette being back in New Orleans. And boinking Jacques. Alas, both of these plots are headed in an unfortunate trajectory but there were some moments of pure happy there. Also moments of food porn. It makes me wish her restaurant was a real place and I wasn't a vegetarian.

Two biggest surprises: The show finally managed to convince me that Toni/Terry was a good idea, and getting me solidly invested in Sonny/Lin/Lin's family. Given that I wanted Sonny to die horribly in season 1, it's amazing how much I was rooting for him to not fuck up his life. I feel like this is a natural end for their story and I'll be disappointed if they reappear in S4, but I thought it was genuinely touching and surprising.

What impressed me most about the season: The subtle but relentless tension. I was seriously a nervous wreck watching the last half. Without having a shocking death like in the last two seasons, the sense that the characters' lives were precarious, that the stakes were real, and that horrible things were coming was incredibly visceral. It got to the point where I would reach the end of an episode and be relieved that everyone had survived at the end. Most of the violence is understated (the worst thing we see, Henry Glover's murder, happens off-screen) but that just makes it all the more realistic.

Things I didn't so much love

Sad to say it, but Davis was boring this season. After going through immense character growth, he's back to his S1 self: whiny, obnoxious, and inconsiderate. I do like the "I Quit" song and very much hope that there's a full, uncensored version floating out there somewhere. But really. STFU Davis.

Annie was also boring, other than when she was playing fiddle or revealing that her mother is Isabella Rossellini. I wouldn't have minded so much if her success=corruption story hadn't so closely paralleled Janette's; it has Unfortunate Implications. The two female characters having to sell out in order to realize their dreams, contrasted with Delmond's continued rise—and refusal, in the last episode, to compromise his ethics—was a wee bit problematic.

Nelson showed hints of being interesting in S2, but seems to have shed that complexity now. Which isn't the worst thing, since the Jazz Center plot is so complicated that having more than one character evolve through it might have made things confusing. But he still got way too much screen time.


Shorter sabotabby: It's amazing. There is, alas, only one half-season left despite it being one of the most relevant, engaging, beautifully made TV shows I have ever seen. Go watch it!

Compare the media coverage of the whatever-it-is anniversary of Princess Diana's death with the media coverage of the second anniversary of Hurricane Katrina.

Just sayin'.

P.S. Many of Katrina's victims are still living in trailers and not getting the help they need. You can help.

Via realcdaae: We don't know how many people—most of them poor and black—died because of Hurricane Katrina. A lot of them died slowly, especially the sick and elderly, because help couldn't get there in time.

Fortunately, the, um, pre-born were rescued. Huzzah for the snowflake babies!

“That is great! I’m going to call all our officers and tell them. They’ll be pretty excited,” said Lt. Eric Bumgarner, one of seven Illinois Conservation Police officers and three Louisiana state troopers who sloshed through floodwaters to remove the embryos. Bumgarner said he has often wondered what happened to the embryos: “One of these embryos could be the next president.”

Arguably, said embryo couldn't do a worse job than the current president did.

Now with 100% less original content!

Scalzi gets it, of course.

nihilistic_kid on how to get the most out of the news.

In case you haven't read Jordan Flaherty's article yet.

Or Randall Robinson's article.

Canadian media watch: Out of all the dailies, the Globe and Mail was the first to say what we've all been saying for the past few days. This is about class and race. On their front cover. It's exceedingly obvious, of course, but none of the other papers seem to have brought it up.

Via Making Light and a bunch of other places: This graphic's been going around.

Via kynn: The National Guard won't let the Red Cross into New Orleans.



Non-NOLA related stuff:

Ganked from cdaae: Read this. It's funny.

I'm watching, and feeling, sadness turning into physical horror turning into rage. And people wonder why folks in New Orleans are rioting?

( cut for pure and uncensored sabotabby-rage )

On a comparatively trivial note, I really, really wish my landlords (father and son) would agree to discuss rent disputes over the phone instead of insisting on getting together with me in person. Just because my landlord has nothing better to do with his time doesn't mean that I have nothing better to do with my time. They always show up late and I waste my entire evening on what could be solved in a few minutes of discussion.