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Treme Season 3 Primer

David Simon excels at creating rich, textured, multi-strand narratives that serve as a kind of animating current meant to bring a particular setting to life. The Wire and Homicide: Life on the Streets gave us grimy, bottom-up views of institutional malaise and its deleterious effect on urban life in Baltimore. His newest show, Treme (which has its third season premier this Sunday), deals with New Orleans, a city equally as damaged by bureaucratic ineptitude and entropy, but further enervated by natural disaster in the form of Hurricane Katrina. Whereas his Baltimore opuses had their eyes set on crime, however, Treme finds its through-line in the singular and enduring culture of the Crescent City.

Sonny:

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A musician hailing from Amsterdam, Sonny was in a relationship with Annie when we first met him. He spent his time either on the keyboard with her accompanying on violin, or in bars telling people about his time helping to rescue stranded residents during the flooding. His music suffered from his addiction to heroin, however, and soon enough Annie left him to chase her own rapidly ascending star. He got a steady gig with Antoine’s band but had to clean up in order to keep it, taking a day job working the shrimp boats trolling the gulf. There he met the daughter of a Vietnamese captain, and worked the man’s boat to get his blessing for their budding relationship.

Annie:

A shy, nieve young woman who can saw the fiddle with the best of them, Annie stuck with Sonny as long as she could. When they broke up she had nowhere to turn, and wound up on Davis’ doorstep. They had a chaste history, having spent Mardis Gras together enjoying the charms of their city. Now they are an item, each working to bring their dreams to life. Annie is an accomplished player, but was struggling to segue into composing. She was under the tutelage of Harley, a well known street musician, and was with him the night he was shot during a mugging. While dispensing his remaining possessions she found a series of unfinished pieces, and set to finishing them to not only aid herself, but to honor her fallen mentor.

Toni & Sofia Bernette:

The series has not been kind to the relationship between this mother and daughter. Husband and father Creighton Bernette was a professor of English who loved the city of New Orleans. Following the storm, he grew despondent over the state of his beloved city, a place he would never see again in full, and took his life. Toni tried to hide the nature of her husband’s death from their daughter, Sofia. Sofia put two and two together on her own, though, and began a series of small but escalating rebellions.

Toni, meanwhile, was using her law practice to uncover the crimes of the New Orleans Police Department following the storm. This brought her closer to Lt. Terry Colson, but also put her at odds with the rest of NOPD. Sofia meanwhile took an internship with Councilman Thomas to make herself look better in court following a minor arrest, an internship that ended when the Councilman was indicted for taking bribes, but which gave her a new and positive perspective on her mother all the same.

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