Will Treme Surpass The Wire?

Can David Simon’s new television show, Treme, possibly live up to expectations? By the end of its run, people were calling his last show, The Wire, the best television show in history. In The New York Times Magazine, Wyatt Mason visits the set of Treme and compares it to its predecessor. “Whereas through its five seasons The Wire built a vivid portrait of urban America as seen through the prism of its institutions and professions—the police department, the drug trade, the dockworkers, the local government, the schools, the press—Treme, though no less focused on the workings and failings of 21st-century American urban existence, tells its story not through a city’s institutions but through its individuals.” He continues, “[B]ecause so many of [The Wire’s] story lines dramatized the futility of any of these characters’ attempts to break through social and economic ceilings, the image of contemporary urban America that the show offered was one in which character wasn’t fate so much as a fait accompli: In the land of the free market, Simon was arguing, free will wasn’t going to get you very far. In Treme, Simon seems to be arguing for the very opposite idea: the triumph of the individual will despite all impediments, a show about people, artists for the most part, whose daily lives depend upon the free exercise of their wills to create—out of nothing, out of moments—something beautiful.”