Season 4 opens with New Orleans celebrating the election of Barack Obama. Desautel opens her own Bywater restaurant. LaDonna rebuilds Gigi's bar. School band director Batiste gets invested in his students' lives.
Treme bids a fond and tuneful farewell to characters a few of us have come to love and to storylines that went deeply enough into the challenges of rebuilding lives in New Orleans to be considered as much journalism as TV drama.
Slant Magazine
November 29, 2013
The final season of Treme, even as the series continues to overflow with the vitality of live music and an ever-evolving regional hash of international cultures, hangs on death.
I'm sorry to see it go, except that it went out on such a perfect note of bittersweet complexity -- like the culture it celebrates and mourns and suggests will endure anyway, it's something to have been relished even as it's come to a close.
[Treme brings] back the many fine and occasionally interlocking characters amid a vivid depiction of a town reeling still from hurricane and neglect, but nurtured by its joyous music.
Treme has had a bumpier run than might have been expected, but it looks like we may be getting the killer party at the end that the show, and city, deserve.
It's to the credit of the show's creators, David Simon and Eric Overmyer, that these characters have become so familiar and alive in only 30-plus episodes.
Even with the occasional ray of hope, Simon's general outlook is too bleak to provide much consolation, either for his characters or for the show's small but loyal audience.
Full of intriguing characters, fine actors, music and Big Easy "atmosphere," Treme -- it's pronounced "TreMAY," by the way -- never caught on, and now seems as good a time as any to ask why.