Since announcing his retirement from filmmaking, Steven Soderbergh amped up his famously prolific output, releasing a staggering eight films between 2009 and 2013. This phase contains some of the most-successful and best-reviewed works of his career, including Contagion, Magic Mike, Haywire, Side Effects, and the Liberace biopic Behind the Candelabra, which premiered in competition at the Cannes Film Festival last week.

With the airing of Candelabra – the highest rated film for HBO since 2004  – Soderbergh announced that while he sees this as his last movie, this does not mean that he is retiring from artistic ventures per se. Instead, the director has been setting the stage for his second-act as TV/stage director-painter-novelist-t-shirt entrepreneur and headphone designer-hyphenate.

Some of these roles are obviously on the traditional side of art and industry, as are his plans to direct for the Broadway stage – several plays that screenwriter partner Scott Z. Burns (The Informant!, Contagion, and Side Effects) wrote – and two musicals. The first of these is the inevitable stage adaptation of Magic Mike, slated for Broadway next season and which could feature audience participation in the form of lap dances. The director plans to stage his long-gestating Cleopatra musical, possibly starring Catherine Zeta-Jones.

The director’s recent statements at the State of Cinema Address at the San Francisco Film Festival seemingly provide his rationale for leaving filmmaking. In the 45-minute speech, Soderbergh described the new conservatism of Hollywood Studios. In the current economic climate,  these risk-averse studios will not even fund pre-sold properties with A-list stars such as Michael Douglas and Matt Damon. According to the director, every studio turned Candelabra away, because the film was deemed “too gay.”

Given the film’s extremely positive reviews, its bravura performances by Michael Douglas and Matt Damon and its big numbers for HBO, Soderbergh may not simply be having the last laugh, but is leaving the film industry on a high note and under his own terms.

Citing the creative possibilities of the medium and the sophistication of TV audiences, it may not be too surprising that the director announced that he is migrating to the medium. First up, he will be making a ten-part series, entitled “The Knick” – a series which takes place in the Knickerbocker Hospital at the turn of the 20^th Century for HBO affiliate, Cinemax. Soderbergh is also adapting John Barthes’ cult 1960s novel The Sot-Weed Factor into a 12-episode series that he intends to either distribute through television or via Netflix.

Soderbergh is also exploring the creative possibilities of the Internet. One such project is his live-tweeting a spy novella entitled “Glue” via his twitter handle @bitchuation. The novella is distinguished by way of its second-person narration and is occasionally accentuated by pictures of its European setting.

Perhaps even more strange is the release of Soderbergh’s new website Extension 765 (itself an obscure reference to Francis Ford Coppola’s The Conversation). The site is billed as a “One-of-a-kind marketplace from Steven Soderbergh” and fans can not only purchase souvenir items from his various productions (such as the clapboard from Erin Brockovich) but can also buy one of Soderbergh’s new film-savvy line of T-Shirts, each of which contains an obscure reference to a canonical film.

Strangest of all is a page related to the director’s enterprise as a would-be Bolivian liquor salesman – which consists of some purple prose describing the drink, a bizarre poster of Soderbergh as spokesman, and a brief video of a roller derby team in motion, rendered in the director’s signature style. To my mind, the page and the website verge on the territory explored by Banksy in Exit Through the Gift-Shop and I would not be entirely surprised if, given the director’s proclivity for experimentation combined with dry wit if the whole Bolivian liquor venture turned out to be the director’s attempt to synthesize advertising, enterprise and art.

While many artists have famously crossed into other arts and enterprises and back again, what seems unique in this case is how determined Soderbergh is to free himself of the constraints of studio filmmaking at the height of their conservatism and find a new sandbox to play in. Perhaps one of the most distinguishing features of the director’s career is his uncanny ability to be on the cutting edge of new technologies (which may also account for his desire to collaborate on a headphone line with the makers of the RED-one camera) and to ride ahead of the crest of industry trends. Perhaps even more ironically, Soderbergh’s new role as a media polymath and industry soothsayer seems to have given Soderbergh some the best press of his career, not to mention the auteur status that has largely eluded him for most of his time as a filmmaker.

Clearly, Soderbergh is not going anywhere. Instead, he may simply be migrating to where he believes his audiences are, finding the best ways to interact with them — whether by way of television, via twitter or by simply inventing his own marketplace from scratch.

These concerns were allayed in part by the program’s second episode.  “Meet De Boys on De Battlefront” sees Treme find its feet by making authenticity its primary focus. Although some have accused the episode of being heavy-handed, I think that this approach is justified as it takes the series’ sense of place and explores the characters’ connection to it. With an emphasis on work and tourism, Simon and company work their way out of the authenticity cul-de-sac by interrogating the nature of geo-cultural belonging in a place that boasts myriad interconnected classes, cultures, and communities. The storylines concerning the Wisconsin tourists,  Zahn’s struggling musician/DJ Davis McAlary, and Pierce’s trombone player Antoine Batiste examine what it means to be ‘of’ New Orleans – to know it, to inhabit it, and to be provided for by it.

We see McAlary lose his DJ job as a result of a traditional New Orleans voodoo ceremony performed to authenticate his relocated radio station. After attempting to borrow money from his wealthy parents, he takes a job as a concierge at a Bourbon Street hotel, where his discomfort with his own relationship with his environment manifests itself in a conspicuous distaste for ostensibly phony tourists and an excessive eagerness to demonstrate his local knowledge to those he deems worthy. We see that McAlary is the ultimate tourist in his own town; sharing his local knowledge is the only way for him to establish a claim that he belongs, just as the hotel job is necessary for this would-be musician to survive. Yet this strenuous performance of belonging ultimately costs McAlary his post when he instructs a New Orleans church group to visit a bar in the Treme for a taste of the authentic New Orleans.  Even this does not deter him; encountering them in the street, McAlary cannot resist proffering one last bit of knowledge. He deprives himself of his own breakfast experience in his haste to direct the Wisconsin group to a great local spot.

McAlary contrasts with the character of Antoine Batiste here. Just about broke on the outskirts of town, the trombone player’s partner exhorts him to get a real job, but he refuses. He is a musician, and is resolute that his city will provide that money if he only plays for it. He also ends up on Bourbon Street – accompanying the dancers at a strip club – but he will not admit to it. He is delivered when he pops up at Bullet’s in the Treme, scarfing down a plate of pork with the Wisconsonites before jumping on stage to play with Kermit Ruffins. Batiste is barely making it, but he is making it through music; the implication is that he can do nothing else because he is who he is where he is. He is going to ‘play for that money’ and let the cards fall where they may.

Treme paints in broad strokes here and in the ancillary storylines concerning its characters. This could have been highly problematic if not for the explicit focus on authenticity and belonging. I recoiled when I saw Elvis Costello and Allan Toussaint materialize in a local recording studio, but the scene is redeemed when the African-American players invite Costello to check out Galactic after the session. Costello, who had been so enthusiastic about Ruffins in the pilot, expresses skepticism about the jazz-funk ensemble on the basis of their whiteness to which the trombone player replies that Galactic are legitimate and authentic players. Later, we see the players from the session jump on stage in a performance of racial integration that provides a dollop of nuance to the McAlary-Batiste comparison. Lest we want to think that this is all about race, the program invites us to consider the myriad other factors that make up our identities and position us within our places and communities.

This second episode still exhibits significant problems –the wholly unconvincing buskers who recalled Lost’s Nikki and Paulo, the curious beatdown by Chief Lambreaux, the lethargic primary plotline concerning LaDonna’s missing brother – but its meditation on authenticity and belonging provides viewers with something tangible and substantive to consider. Now, we need only hope that Treme’s plotlines become more engaging so that we might come to care about those who inhabit Simon’s post-Katrina New Orleans storyworld.