What I've Been Watching, Part VII: Justified and Treme

  Before it premiered last month, it was sort understood that Justified would be a serialized show. 

 After all, every other drama on FX has been a serial, and the ads for the show certainly gave that impression of an on-going conflict: an anachronistic lawman going up against a childhood friend-turned-criminal. 

 (It didn't help that these two characters were both played by actors who have appeared on earlier FX serials: Walton Goggins, who starred on seven seasons of The Shield, and Timothy Olyphant, a regular on Damages in its second season, and a veteran of a serialized drama on a different network, HBO's Deadwood.)

 Five weeks in, Justified has proven itself to be more procedural than serial, and I've been seeing some disappointment online among viewers who were hoping for more of an on-going story.

 But it feels a bit wrong, complaining about Justified, easily the best new show I've seen in a long time. (If it didn't come right after Lost, I'd be writing about it here. As it is, I don't have the time to digest/write about Lost and watch Justified the same night, so I usually end up catching Raylan Givens' exploits the following night.)

 Sure, it's a procedural, but one unlike any other procedural on TV right now.

 
 This is how most procedural dramas start, whether your hero is Gregory House at Princeton-Plainsboro or Horatio Caine of the Miami PD: something is wrong. Something happens to throw the natural order of things off kilter. Somebody's been killed. The killer is still out there, and will probably kill again. The main characters chase the killer, who ends the hour either dead or on their way to jail.
 
 
 In the best cases -- Fringe, the original CSI, House -- we'll get to know some of these characters. We might be treated to storylines that stretch over an entire season. In the worst cases -- too many to name here -- we're stuck with flat characters, predictable stories, and unearned sentiment.

 With Justified, you get all the good elements of the best case scenarios -- and none of the worst -- plus a whole lot more: 

•   A hugely likable lead performance by Olyphant, playing a more laid-back -- but no less deadly -- version of his Deadwood sheriff. On that show, he was up against the far more charismatic Ian McShane, and -- as good as he and the show were -- was sort of stuck with the thankless role of the unlikable hero. (As of this writing, I'm about halfway through Pronto, one of the Leonard novels featuring Givens. Leonard describes him as looking like a "farmer," with sunken cheeks and crows feet, an image that made me think more of Harry Dean Stanton than Olyphant.)
• Great dialogue, even in the episodes Elmore Leonard -- who featured Raylan in two books and a short story that formed the basis for the pilot -- really had nothing to do with. Each episode is like watching a miniature version of something like Out of Sight.
• Great guest stars. Not just Goggins -- who really owned the final seasons of The Shield -- but people like Alan Ruck as a criminal-turned-dentist (the series' best episode so far) and veteran character actor Raymond J. Barry as Givens' father.

And the show still has serialized elements. Goggins' Boyd Crowder has appeared twice since the finale, and there's been suggestions that the Crowder family will show up to bother Raylan again before the season ends. We're only about halfway to that point, so it's not too late to start watching.

   ***

    Three episodes in, I'm slowly falling for Treme, David Simon and Eric Overmeyer's HBO series that follows a group of struggling New Orleans residents in the months after Hurricane Katrina.

 Simon created The Wire, arguably the best drama ever made for television, so anything he does is worth noticing. He's created some great, likable -- or at least relatable -- characters, and given them to an amazing cast: Wire actors Wendell Pierce and Clark Peters, joined by Melissa Leo, Khandi Alexander, Kim Dickens, John Goodman and Steve Zahn.

The Wire was set in Baltimore, and even though it continually referenced the city's history and culture, its themes applied to virtually any urban environment in America.

 Treme (pronounced "Treh-may") couldn't be Treme without New Orleans, and without Katrina. It's what ties all the characters together. "How's your house" seems to have replaced "hello" as a greeting, and the storm/flood are at the root of virtually every conflict going on here, from Dickens' struggling restaurant to Alexander's search for her lost brother. 

 The Wire never held its audience's hands, and Treme is pretty much the same way. The show takes no time to explain what a Mardi Gras Indian is, or why the Preservation Hall is important. And at first, Treme's attitude to outsiders might seem a bit off-putting, until you realize the characters who complain the loudest about tourists* are, well, dicks. Besides, even if the show won't provide footnotes, the New Orleans Times-Picayune will. Writer Dave Walker keeps a blog that explains a lot of the different cultural and historical details of the show. 

 (One of my favorite historic details, incidentally, was one that needed no explanation: Goodman's professor character's first glimpse at YouTube -- launched just after Katrina -- and his realization that he had a new venue for his rants.)

 Three episodes is usually the point where I say I'm in or out with a show, and I think I'm in where Treme is concerned. It's not as immediate or as addictive as The Wire, but it's more hopeful and maybe even a little fun. (Even if you're like me and don't like jazz, it's just neat to see characters who love the music this much.) To paraphrase a character from another great HBO show, in the midst of death, they are in life.

 *I'm excluding the scene at the end of the third episode where the tour bus interrupts the memorial service. There's a big difference between the Wisconsin college kids just wanting to help and a bunch of people gawking.

Tom Coombe