The Knick’s Clinical Style

Andrew deWaard

Poking a Dead Horse

Regarding the original script for The Knick, Steven Soderbergh “knew that if [he] said no, the second person who read it would say yes.” In fact, the critical reception of the show seems to find the only flaw to be the script and clunky dialogue, whereas the directing is considered, by Matt Zoller Seitz of New York Magazine, to be “the greatest sustained display of directorial virtuosity in the history of American TV.” We might consider, then, that perhaps the script itself wasn’t necessarily the attraction for Soderbergh, but the opportunity it presented to channel so many of his cinematic preoccupations and skills into one formal package.

Like his early, then-controversial experiment with a multi-platform day-and-date release for Bubble, a practice that has since become common for indie films, Soderbergh is again innovating at the margins of the industry by fronting all ten episodes of a prestige television series, a method that will now be employed by David Fincher and David Lynch as well. True Detective, a show which shares a production company (Anonymous Content) with The Knick, received much acclaim last year for its similar use of only one director, though not to the same degree of singular vision employed by Soderbergh and his many pseudonyms. As Peter Andrews he is the cinematographer and camera operator; as Mary Ann Bernard, the editor, a system he has employed for more than a decade in his filmmaking, as well as his first foray into television back in 2003 for the underrated K-Street.

Like the color-coded storylines in The Underneath and Traffic, as well as the expressive use of yellow in The Informant!, The Knick presents its hospital scenes in a stark monochrome with (literal) splashes of red, its wealthy interiors in bright, claustrophobic decadence, and its underclass exteriors in drab, underlit earth tones; each color palette plays a representative role. The use of natural light with a digital camera is another aspect of Soderbergh’s cinematography that has been honed over the years, from the early miniDV experiment Full Frontal and the HDNet-produced Bubble and The Girlfriend Experience, to the frank, digital depictions of violence in Haywire and pandemic in Contagion.The reasons are technological (Soderbergh was an early, vocal proponent of the now common RED camera), financial (quicker, less costly setups), and performative (less stoppage means more fluid acting), but at The Knick, the lighting is both a literal and figurative concern, from the electrification of the hospital to the dynamics of power and enlightenment that energize the characters.

This visual scheme is also befitting of Soderbergh’s aim to sully the prestige of the period picture through formal means. Like The Good German, which uses only the filming equipment of the era but none of the constraints of the Hays code to present its tale of post-WWII American duplicity, or Che, which focuses on the day-to-day realities of revolution, Soderbergh’s approach to depicting history is to shine a natural light on the process, rather than the spectacle. The opening scene of The Knick features a child poking a dead horse; the rest of the series will graphically demonstrate in clinical detail how the history of technological progress, and early medical experimentation in particular, is not too far removed from that image.

After The Knick, Television Has No Excuse to Not Make Race Meaningfully Visible

Kristen Warner

A look at the professional and personal lives of the staff at New York’s Knickerbocker Hospital during the early part of the twentieth century. Andre Holland and Clive Owen.

Having not noticed the marketing or promotion for the premiere of The Knick, I was unaware of Andre Holland’s presence and was pleasantly surprised to see him on screen in the pilot episode. Holland’s character Dr. Algernon Edwards arrives at the Knickerbocker hospital without much fanfare. The Black Harvard trained surgeon, just returning from a prominent residency in Paris, arrives at The Knick in search of Clive Owen’s Dr. John Thackery who he imagines will heartily welcome him to the hospital. Expecting a clichéd, superficial “race” conversation, I watched the first meeting between he and Thackery with mild interest. However, my mild interest became obsession once I witnessed Thackery realizing he had been fooled into hiring a Black man.

Edwards: I’m beginning to think you weren’t told everything about me. You envisioned something different I take it. Something…lighter.

Thackery: I did. And to be frank Dr. Edwards, I only agreed to this meeting as a courtesy to Ms. Robertson but I am certainly not interested in an integrated hospital staff.

Edwards: My skin color shouldn’t matter.

Thackery: Well if it doesn’t matter why was that information held back from me?

Edwards: You’ll have to ask Ms. Robertson.

Thackery: It’s also nowhere to be found on your credentials.

Edwards: Is your race listed on yours?

Thackery: There’s no need for it to be.

The conversation is a rarity for television because it cleverly allows for race and racial discrimination to exist both at the level of institution and at the individual. Thackery’s reservations about taking Edwards on are not solely bound to his personal feelings but also to the systemic structures that suggested Edwards’ Blackness would operate as an economic hardship for the already struggling hospital. What’s more, that the scene occurs with dark skinned Black coal workers in the background only adds to the layers of privilege Thackery comfortably rests on AND Edwards simultaneously distances himself from.

What’s more, the conversation seeds a larger idea of what Thackery and Edwards’ relationship will be forged upon—economics and efficiency through entrepreneurship. It is only after Thackery discovers Edwards’ underground clinic and learns of the inventions he has created that his Blackness takes a back seat to innovation and he is allowed to exist as more and yet still not enough because his demonstrable title and skill set are only permissible within the confines of the hospital.

Throughout the season we watched Edwards navigate his classed and gendered space between the equally classed and gendered worlds of whiteness and Blackness—because he can never truly belong in either. Cultural specificity as well as questions of racial self-fashioning, repression and respectability are carefully sutured into the text. Where to begin with the richness: Edwards’ Black cohabitants in his hotel whose dignity is tied up in pride and jealousy of what they don’t have, or those he brawls with because he can’t fight the white men, or the Black seamstresses who become surgical nurses (OMG!!) or the Black coal workers who become security for his clinic or his chemistry with my only issue in his storyline: the magically 21^st century, post-racialized yet terribly naïve, white love interest Neely? It is rare—as in NEVER—to have such precision and intelligence and depth with regard to Black folks on television, let alone within one season of a series.

This leads to my final point: watching The Knick, I was reminded of the other television historical drama I watch: Mad Men. Years ago I wrote here that while early seasons of Mad Men may have had justifiable reason to strategically exclude Blackness from its text, I believed at some point the series would explicitly include race as part of its frame. As of yet, that still has not happened. Thus that The Knick, a tale of turn of the century New York City can find ways to make Black bodies visible and their experiences meaningful in a time and space they are not normally represented in media without resorting to hindsight smugness and Mad Men, a tale of 1950/60s New York City would not, is quite revealing.

“Pretty Silver Stitches”: the Sounds of Surgery in Steven Soderbergh’s The Knick

Lisa Coulthard

In his influential The Soundscape: Our Sonic Environment and the Tuning of the World, R. Murray Schafer comments on the phenomenon of disappearing sounds in our acoustic environment — that certain sounds such as leather saddlebags, school hand bells and razors being stropped will someday be extinct and unknown. From the clop of horse hooves and wooden carriage wheels on brick roads to the glass and metal clink of medicine vials and hypodermics, representations of endangered sounds carry with them both a sonic nostalgia and a sometimes uncanny sense of the acoustic dead coming back to life. What is so intriguing about the soundscape of Steven Soderbergh’s circa 1900 New York in The Knick is the way it thoroughly and unambiguously rejects this sonic nostalgia, while at the same time adhering to and celebrating a degree of acoustic historicism. Many have commented favorably on the anachronism of the synthesizer and electronically based music of composer Cliff Martinez (a longtime collaborator of Soderbergh’s), noting that it offsets expectations and avoids clichéd citations of operettas, ragtime, classical or other music one might associate with the era. The complex music for the show instead emphasizes droning minimalism, electronic software synthesizers, and rhythms and tones more resonant of musique concrete than televisual scoring. In particular, the use of the baschet cristal, a mid-century friction ideophone favored by musique concrete composers indicates the musical ties are in not only anachronistic but in direct opposition to the period presented.

But the use of synthesizers and instruments such as the electric guitar or baschet cristal do more than merely distance The Knick  from its historically based setting. Stressing sounds more than distinct musical pieces, and blurring effects into music (via heartbeats or similar rhythms), Martinez’s music weaves through the series in an integrated way that, as Jed Mayer suggests, “does not so much accompany scenes as insinuate itself into them.” With no conventional credit sequence or series song, Martinez’s music occupies a pervasive rather distinct presence in The Knick. And yet, with titles such as “Pretty Silver Stitches,” “Son of Placenta Previa,” “Abscess,” and “Aortic Aneurysm junior,” Martinez’s music tracks stress the particular importance of music in the operating scenes. In the same way that Martinez’s use of electronic music and the physical vibratory tonalities of the baschet cristal highlight organic/inorganic binaries, so does the combination of music and sound effects in the surgery scenes. Heavily scored, these surgery scenes are also acoustically graphic – emphasizing the drainage of blood through hand cranked machines or vacuum suction, the spurting flow of fluids, the thud of blood soaked sponges, the metal and glass tings of surgery implements, the sounds effects of the operating room highlight the coming together of organic and inorganic materials in the act of twentieth century surgery. The anachronisms of the music are thus less shocking than one might think – engaged with organic and inorganic materials, blending sonic rhythms with music, and integrating into the action, Martinez’s music works in concert with the historically accuracies of the sound effects to create a split acoustic space, drained of the nostalgia for lost objects discussed by Schafer, but resonant with the coming together of bodies and machines that define the birth of modern surgery, which is after all The Knick’s central drama.

Clive Owen’s Dirtied Star Image in The Knick

R. Colin Tait

In Emily Nussbaum’s original New Yorker pan of The Knick, she stated that her biggest problem with the series is that it relies on cliches that have come to populate the latest iteration of the Premium Cable era of TV. Most offensive of these tropes to Nussbaum is the antiheroic figure of William Thackery — the brilliant, troubled, (ahem…racist) and cocaine-addicted surgeon played with particular fury by movie star Clive Owen. However, Thackery does not merely represent “more of the same” for TV’s era of “Difficult Men,” nor is this type a recent phenomenon. Nussbaum could just as easily be complaining about Shakespeare’s Prince Hamlet, Macbeth or King Richard the Third as examples of a well-worn type — complex characters whose moral ambiguity is a draw for both audiences and actors alike. Indeed, tragic complexity is nothing new, nor should it be treated as such.

Owen’s portrayal of Thackery is a revelation within his career for several reasons, partly due to the long-form seriality of the series and partly due to his collaboration with Steven Soderbergh. Soderbergh has often coaxed career-best performances from his actors. Since he directs, shoots and lights all the scenes himself, the result is a remarkable sense of intimacy with his actors on the set. Second, the director often employs actors to work against their type – as in Matt Damon’s role in The Informant! where the actor gained forty pounds, or, more recently, where Michael Douglas refashioned himself in an Emmy-winning turn as flamboyant superstar pianist Liberace in Behind the Candelabra. Third, Soderbergh employs open framings, long-takes, and shoots little extra coverage, ensuring that the performance in front of the camera is solely the actor’s responsibility and that they bring their best as soon as the camera rolls.

Owen’s performance of Thackery – ranging from his cocaine-inspired megalomania to his pathetic, desperate moments trying to kick the drug – also conforms to a ‘modernist’ streak within Soderbergh’s work, where the actors effectively work so far against their star persona that it becomes “dirtied.” There is almost something of a Brechtian distanciation effect as we watch Owen perform Thackery, and it is impossible to separate the sensation of watching his performance from the sensation of watching the actor wreck their star image.

For Owen, playing Thackery allows the actor to do something that his film roles only partially allowed him to. Indeed, the most memorable Owen parts are the ones where he plays complicated, flawed characters (think Children of Men and Closer here) or where he was a handsome, blank slate (The Hire, Croupier). These characteristics have not always gelled with Hollywood stardom and have ultimately led to Owen only ascending so high as a leading man.

However, the new emphasis on flawed protagonists within cable television allows Owen to sit in his sweet spot. Playing Thackery affords the actor much more leeway to emphasize the traits that made him famous in the first place, ruggedly handsome, taciturn and intelligent instead of the ill-fitting action roles that he has sometimes been shoehorned into as a result of being a leading man in Hollywood.

What all the roles of the cable drama era have in common with Shakespearean drama – ranging from Bryan Cranston’s Walter White in Breaking Bad, to Michael Sheen’s portrayal of William Masters in Masters of Sex, to Owen in The Knick – is they separate the actor from their stardom, distilling each performance down to the specifics of their complexity and allowing the actors and their audiences to revel in the dirt.

Watch the full episode. See more Masterpiece.

Masterpiece Theatre is premiering new mini-series Downton Abbey tomorrow night on PBS.  Produced for ITV in Britain, the show first aired there in October, 2010 and is available for viewers in the UK on iTunes and DVD. If, like myself, you have not been able to procure a copy for yourself, all that is available until tomorrow night is the PBS preview (embedded above) replete with long establishing shots of a large British country estate, long, corseted frocks, and Maggie Smith as a vexed dowager.  Possessing all the characteristics of a typical British period piece mini-series, Downton is not based upon a piece of literature. Rather, it is created and written by author and film scribe Julian Fellowes, whose films Gosford Park and Young Victoria, along with his books Snobs and Past Imperfect, all centered around the subject of British aristocracy, usually from the perspective of an outsider. Thus, though Downton Abbey seems to participate in the genre of British literature period-piece mini-series, it has been entirely crafted within the perspective of our contemporary neoliberal political environment. I haven’t seen the show myself, but I anticipate that it will have implicit feminist, post-colonial, and social class sentiments.

Downton is the latest in a long history of popular British mini-series exports to PBS, such as 1967’s The Forsyte Saga, 1981 ‘s Brideshead Revisited (famously starring a young Jeremy Irons) and 2001’s The Way We Live Now, to name a few of the more popular ones. I focus this post on British period piece mini-series because it is my impression that, for the most part, their popularity often outweighs film versions. This is, at least in part, attributed to the constraints of a two-hour format to fit in long novels, and the para-social relationships viewers establish tuning to episodes of a mini-series. I may be off on this last point: I have not done any formal research, but the latest mainstream film adaptation of Pride and Prejudice faded from popular conscious as quickly as it left cinemas, while the 1995 BBC mini-series continues to be extremely popular. This is not to say that Brit-lit period piece films do not continue to be popular – but it is my impression that long-term fandom remains decidedly the domain of Brit-lit mini-series.

I remember waiting with baited breath for each installment of the BBC’s 1995 Pride & Prejudice when it aired on A&E in 1996. I taped the second and third installments of the three-piece series (in the UK it was six-episodes), and watched them over and over again on VHS.  This incarnation of Pride & Prejudice was highly successful, winning a BAFTA and an Emmy, and continues to be widely admired. It has a large following on Facebook (which is baffling, considering that it was released in a pre-Facebook era) and was recently remastered for a DVD released last April, which, according to fans, allows you to see the drops of water on Colin Firth’s chest during his infamous bathing scene. That fans are still blogging about a 15-year old mini-series points to its continuing role in shaping viewers attitudes and actions.

We see this materialize as a large base of fans attempts to recreate or participate in customs presented in these period pieces. I see this fandom as different from sub-cultures like Steampunk in that it romanticizes and attempts to reconstruct a precise historical era and way of life, instead of constructing alternate histories or incorporating science fiction/fantasy. That is not to say that period-piece fandom is not entirely fantastical.

Fans of the Regency era gowns in 1995’s Pride and Prejudice can order patterns online, and dance at the Bal Masque at the annual Jane Austen Society of North America.  There is a large selection of online clothiers who sell period piece costumes, such as Gentleman’s Emporium, and I’ve observed that these sites seem to mainly offer Regency and Victorian apparel, the usual setting of these period-piece mini-series.  I am not suggesting that this is mutually exclusive (mini-series fans are not all buying costumes and having Victorian tea parties). However, they are certainly related, especially considering that fans’ primary visual acquaintance with this lifestyle has been via constructed representations of television mini-series and films.

The market for period costumes, patterns, and other paraphernalia (etiquette books, or ephemera, etc.) is based solely of fans, among which I must include myself, who attempt not only to recreate a past unavailable, but nonexistent. These mini-series construct variegated representations of white, primarily heterosexual, aristocratic life. And though narratives include feminist implications when we see the entailment of estates away from females to male cousins and the like, the dominant patriarchal structure is relatively unquestioned. Tomorrow night’s Downton Abbey program has been such a huge success, that ITV has contracted a second mini-series to air in the UK later this year.  Which begs the question, as Downton Abbey‘s first series is about to premiere on U.S. television, why do these fantasies of bygone eras continue to capture our imagination?

Among the many threads entwined in this production are its virtually fetishistic engagement with and display of early 20th century material culture, including forms of media. One scene finds Buscemi’s character in the company of a handful of other local bigshots, enjoying a hand-cranked bit of celluloid pornography, which catches on fire in the projector when the fellow at the crank tires out; other scenes present meditations on letters and postcards and the increasingly unfamiliar forms of time & space distanciation characteristic of “snail mail.” The sets and interactions captured in the program are crowded with objects of turn-of-the-century daily life. Reupholstered, refinished, renewed antique furniture populates cluttered sitting rooms; freshly tailored suits and dresses in century-old styles, curtains and lampshades, glossy vintage automobiles abound: objects reproduced or refurnished contribute to Boardwalk Empire’s Deadwood-style HBO hyperreality.

Some of the elements I’ve been finding most fascinating are the appearances and sounds of recorded music on spinning Victrolas and the lingering focus on one of L. Frank Baum’s Oz books, The Road to Oz (1909). Ancient shellac 78s provide diegetic and non-diegetic music for numerous scenes; the Victrolas feature both as suppliers of musical sound and as big wooden obstacles navigated by the program’s cast as they move through the brocaded chambers. A scene takes place in an illegal casino housed in an H.H. Richardson-style brownstone, the camera placed such that the foreground is dominated by a table-top phonograph with the giant acoustic tone-arm caught fleck-fleck-fleck-ing in the locked end-groove. Thompson’s brother Eli, covering for the usual bag-man, enters to discover that he’s the victim of a robbery in progress, stalled in anticipation of his arrival; the phonograph needle’s repetitive circumnavigation of the disc’s matrix – and its foregrounded surface noise – a retrospective indicator that something’s going on here. The program’s modulation of the sound of the 78s’ surface noise, in both diegetic and non-diegetic aspects, appear as evidence of a conundrum: the surface noise is the accumulated wear that is probably an unavoidable dimension of any playback of a 90 year old analog recording, yet in the world of the program those recordings are new, or newish. What does this audible patina do here? The scuffs and wear on ninety-year-old furniture can be masked and polished; ancient platters can be digitized and manipulated; but the sounds of age in these records contribute to Boardwalk Empire’s construction of a hyperreal 1920 Atlantic City.

Baum’s The Road to Oz appears late in season 1, when Margaret Schroeder, widowed consort of Enoch Thompson, ensconced in a luxury suite at Thompson’s expense, is shown reading the book aloud to her two children. At this point in the series, Thompson has become a target of Arnold Rothstein’s thugs, and Richard Harrow, a grossly disfigured veteran, is installed in the suite to protect the family. The children are repulsed by Harrow’s appearance – half his face is missing and is ordinarily covered by a painted tin mask a la Phantom of the Opera – but when he makes a joke about being the tin man, they warm up to him. The camera soon finds the quartet happily settled on the couch, united through Baum’s fantastic narrative. But it’s the book itself that stands out here. Again, among the refurbished/reproduced, new-looking furnishings, a strangely aged, out-of-place first edition emerges briefly and we are shown John R. Neill’s starkly graceful, understated rendering of the Tin Man. “I was very happy among the Munchkins and Winkies and Quadlings and Gillikens…” Schroeder reads to her two children and the family’s bodyguard, as sense of homey peace settles around the threatened domestic scene.

In my perception of the program, these media artifacts draw attention to themselves; they stand out like sore thumbs in Boardwalk Empire’s recreated 1920s East Coast interiors. Their incongruity – obviously worn, ninety-year-old media amidst polished surfaces, carefully reupholstered furniture, freshly tailored vintage clothing, and reproduction Edison lamp bulbs – makes me wonder: what is it about these media objects that exempts them from reproduction? Why go to such trouble to make everything else look freshly made for sale in the second decade of the 20th century, but include these palimpsests of uncountable readings and listenings in their aged, scuffed, dried-out, intimately savored forms? What does the apparent “authenticity” of these reverse time-travelers do for the program’s producers? For its viewers? The expressions fixed in this book and these records exist virtually and could be freshly reproduced at, I’m guessing, little added cost. Why haul out and dust off these bits of bygone media, these pictures of Dorian Gray?

So far, the similarities are striking, and one would expect continuous comparison between the two, and yet their genre, pedigree, and network associations make these shows seem as far apart as The Wire and Gossip Girl. Oddly enough, I gave True Blood (TB) a second chance when Jason Mittell and Louisa Stein praised its politics and narrative complexity during a Flow conference Wire panel two years ago. In contrast, I tried The Vampire Diaries (TVD) again after my online fan friends praised its strong female characters and intricate plotting. Both shows contain complex plots with often unexpected surprises and fast turnarounds. TB follows a variety of plot and character lines to create an expansive set of stories while TVD remains more singularly focused and thus tremendously fast paced. Both shows take more than a couple of sentences to retell a single episode, with ambiguous characters and repeated betrayal as constants.

And yet one is quality TV on HBO, watched by men and women alike, and names such as Alan Ball and Anna Paquin all but guarantee that it be taken seriously as an artistic engagement–even if we may just watch it for the bloodied sexual encounters and the melodrama. The other is firmly defined as teen TV, runs on the CW and its stars are more likely to appear on the cover of the online Portrait magazine than Rolling Stone. Part of this difference in perception between the two programs is clearly gendered: TB’s extreme sexual violence and voyeuristic viewer position invites male viewers even where the initial topic of a female protagonist and her vampire lover might not. Moreover, the amazingly artistic and political trailer promises a depth that I personally feel the show fails to deliver. TVD, on the other hand, is clearly geared toward young girls with its high school protagonist and two male hunks who desire her. The high school setting and teen tropes mark the show as a typical CW show, with its melodramatic aspects foregrounded rather than hidden. Likewise this allows for viewers’ identificatory potential in a way that TB doesn’t: TB instead establishes a more distanced view position that profits from its visual spectacle.

Part of me wants to like TVD simply because it seems more honest in its range, goals, and intended audiences. But I can’t fault a show for its paratexts nor for its reception. So why do I ultimately enjoy and prefer the teen show over its more sexy, adult, quality counterpart. I don’t particularly like Elena better than Sookie (faux Southern accent notwithstanding) nor do I find Somerhalder that much more attractive than Skarsgård. Plots in both are a fast and crazy ride, and while the production values are clearly better in the HBO show, both are sufficiently glossy and visually enjoyable. I do find sexual and racial politics more problematic in TB, but my reasons for liking TVD are actually about themes and characters: I enjoy the teen characters as a way to explore coming of age and adulthood anxieties via supernatural metaphors, and I like the way I can identify with the characters rather than merely observing them on their wild rides. Television certainly doesn’t need to be edifying, but I more often feel like I want to explore the moral dilemmas and interpersonal conflicts in TVD. If I were to pick a worthy successor of Buffy’s Sunnydale, it would be Mystic Falls rather than Bon Temps.

This past Sunday marked the latest installment in what has become a semiannual event in my household. About every 12 or 18 months, the desirability of the HBO original programming lineup teams up with my frustration over lousy DSL download speeds and my lingering conscience about copyright infringement to convince me it’s worth $15 a month to subscribe. This warm feeling usually lasts three or four months, till I become miffed with the indeterminate period between seasons of Curb Your Enthusiasm, and admit there’s nothing so culturally relevant about True Blood that I can’t wait for the DVD release.

The blessed event was initiated this year by the premiere of David Simon’s new series, Treme. I was tipped off by a colleague’s Facebook post, and more importantly, my eagerness to subscribe was surely motivated by a desire to make up for my embarrassingly belated immersion in The Wire. I belong among those who were too busy watching Six Feet Under, Sex and the City, Deadwood, and, yes, The Sopranos (not to mention already depressed by consecutive George W. Bush “administrations”) to dedicate TV time to The Wire’s narrative-ly complex social realism.

But, no more! For I have drunk the David Simon Kool-Aid. Said beverage must have been the “electric” kind Tom Wolfe wrote about, because it has inspired hallucinogenic dreams of impossible spinoffs—a sitcom with Omar and Brother Muozone managing a vegetarian diner a la Alice or Cheers, or a re-vamped X-Files starring Bubbles and Kima as paranormal investigators.

And so, last Sunday, I eagerly plied my wife and honored guests with a big bottle of (cheap!) Pinot Grigio in anticipation of impending David Simon greatness. Who better to wield quality television as a bludgeon against government incompetence and malevolent neglect, not to mention the continued lack of public will to rebuild the great American city of New Orleans?

Indeed, Treme delivered on all the expected markers of quality TV circa 2010, an era in which The Wire, not Sex and the City or The Sopranos reigns as model of HBO’s “not TV.” Here are a few key elements:

1. Intertextual pleasures, i.e. former Wire cast members in prominent roles. “There’s the guy that played Lester Freamon, and isn’t the actress that played his girlfriend in season one now his daughter?!”
2. Film actors whose careers have veered dangerously off-course, seeking to re-establish cred while pretending to be happy working on HBO because “It’s Not TV.” John Goodman and Steve Zahn, I’m talking to you.
3. A self-important attitude that reassures us of our own distinction through the lack of sensational content. For example, Treme’s timeframe is comfortably post-Katrina, thereby keeping truly horrific images of Katrina’s devastation off-screen, because we care, but we don’t really want to see that. And we already know that we care, so what’s the point?
4. Arty title sequence: The moldy, spotted walls of flooded houses as backdrop for credits, self-consciously implicate us in our desire to see material evidence of human suffering as abstract backdrop. Or, maybe they just look cool.
5. Flagrant disregard for traditional TV runtimes. Just when you think the Treme pilot is going to go all 55+ minutes like The Wire, it keeps going! And going. Till a properly poignant, but no too poignant, moment.

Perhaps my preoccupation with improbable spinoffs of The Wire is evidence David Simon’s work leaves me, at least subconsciously, cold. How about cutting loose a little? Why such a realist route, however artfully created, to quality TV/cultural critique?

The aforementioned colleague’s Facebook post linked to a newspaper column in the form of a letter from David Simon to the people of New Orleans. The letter somewhat smugly addressed “fact-grounded literalists” who Simon anticipates will complain about the historical inaccuracies and anachronisms bound to populate his fictionalization of post-Katrina New Orleans. Borrowing a line from Picasso, Simon says art is the lie that shows us the truth. As for Treme,

“It is not journalism. It is not documentary. It is a fictional representation set in a real time and place, replete with moments of inside humor, local celebrity and galloping, unrestrained meta. At moments, if we do our jobs correctly, it may feel real.”

Is feeling “real” the most we can hope for from a TV auteur with so much skill and creative control? For all the pleasures of Treme’s graceful, respectful representation of post-Katrina New Orleans, I couldn’t help itching for a bit more crazy. Say, just a little of the crazy deftly at work in Werner Herzog’s post-Katrina Bad Lieutenant. Or the crazy of the American West re-imagined and represented by Deadwood. Or the crazy of Tony Soprano watching a bear wander around his backyard pool. I’m not talking Lost-style, narrative enigma-crazy.

Just television that embraces the representational power of fiction, rather than feeling the need to justify or excuse it.

*Apologies to Lester Bangs, who is long-dead anyway.