Both characters have left New Orleans (in Delmond’s case, his hometown; in Janette’s, the city where she built–and lost–her own restaurant) for New York and are deeply ambivalent about New Orleans and their relationship to it. Whereas the first season played out these competing emotions between and among New Orleaneans, the introduction of outside points of view indicates a lack of understanding and overall ignorance as well as deeply seated prejudices now serving the dismissal of the city. Both scenes linguistically demarcate outsider status when the interlocutors pronounce the city [ˈnuː ɔrˈliːnz] rather than [nuː ˈɔrliənz] or [nuː ˈɔrlənz] as would be expected and more correct. Janette, in fact, offhandedly corrects the other sous chef.

Delmond has represented the New Orleans expatriate throughout the first season already. He goes where the jobs are and at times seems conflictedly ashamed and dismissive of his roots. In one of the early recording sessions in Season 1, we see him with other New Orleans players play New Orleans music for New Orleans citizens, yet the recording takes place in New York. In fact, the issue of how to mainstream market authentic New Orleans music in order to help the very citizens whose culture gets appropriated is not just the story of the benefit recording but that of jazz itself.

And yet it is too easy as a viewer to vilify Delmond. Beyond the local who leaves and sells out, Delmond is also representative of a musical artist who experimentally rejuvenates and thereby expands traditional jazz. Rather than revisiting an idealized past that never existed, this artist engages with a living and changing tradition, embracing contemporary jazz forms that are merging and changing and defying the static sense of an original and authentic music. In a way then Delmond is both more and less commodified: going where the money is, he also rejects the static repetition of what popular culture has defined as authentic New Orleans. So when he gets praised for having overcome New Orleans jazz, for forging his own way in contrast to the sellouts who play the same old tunes for ignorant tourists, he jumps to New Orleans’ defense. Telling his girl friend that “I get to say that. They don’t.” indicates both an identity position that allows him to criticize a place that remains his home but also suggests that he is aware that their easy dismissal is not the same as his complicated love/hate for the musical traditions that brought him to where he is now.

Likewise, Janette’s scene speaks to outside representation and its potentially harmful effects. The review not only trashes current cuisine in New Orleans but takes a cheap shot at its reputation in general: “I’m not certain the cuisine was ever as good as its reputation in part because the people who consumed, evaluated, and admired it likely weren’t sober enough at the time of ingestion to know what they were eating.” In response, Janette defends the food but also connects it to Katrina and its aftermath. Chefs are not just cooks–in her story, they become heroes. But that is clearly not something reviewers like Richman can understand or appreciate. Janette, who left the city and has given up on it for herself nevertheless won’t let others malign the city or its food.

These moments speak most strongly about the role the general perception and national coverage have played in regard to New Orleans and its slow recovery. Both Delmond and Janette struggle to negotiate their own conflicted emotions while nevertheless defending the city and its citizens to the last. And in the middle of the slow recovery that Season 2 sketches out, the opponents are not only the outsiders such as predatory Nelson Hidalgo, who won’t let a disaster go to waste, but also the somewhat condescending, ignorant, and uncaring outsiders who don’t get the city–and don’t want to.

Though his behavior is rude, Sonny’s frustration with the tourists’ pitying gaze is understandable. In the months following Katrina the complexities of the spiraling disaster were overly simplified. As David Simon puts it, the Lower Ninth Ward became “symbolic of the whole city.” Nevertheless, Sonny makes his living primarily by capitalizing on the sentiments of tourists who are looking to hear something “authentic.” Sonny resents the tourists’ simplified view of his city but he caters to it as well.

I cite this scene because the cast members of the latest edition of The Real World, also set in New Orleans, is a lot like that group of Wisconsin tourist-volunteers: naive outsiders with seemingly good intentions. According to The Real World executive producer Jon Murray, the group will be tasked with rebuilding homes during their stay in the Big Easy because “we’re hoping our cast members and the series can play a small role in the city’s rebirth.” Helping others is noble but make no mistake: these kids are in New Orleans to help themselves. More specifically, they are there for the “journey”—a term Real World cast members have historically used to refer to the combined experiences of getting drunk, learning not make racial/ethnic/sexist/homophobic slurs (at least not while on camera), and breaking up with the significant others they left at home. Thus far New Orleans appears in the series as the colorful backdrop for the casts’ bacchanal undertakings.

MTV’s vision of contemporary New Orleans is best exemplified by the décor of the Real World mansion, which is filled kitschy signifiers of its home city: seafood, feathers, brass instruments, and lots and lots of Mardi Gras beads. And when a cast member accidentally (or not so accidentally) reveals a breast or rear end to the camera, the forbidden body part is blocked out with a tiny purple and green Mardi Gras mask. This final touch would probably induce Sonny to commit seppuku.

But me? I’m not so bothered by all of this touristy-ness. In fact, Treme’s “authentic” vision of the city and the Real World’s seemingly inauthentic one serve as useful counterpoints on the contemporary televisual image of New Orleans. David Simon’s series is mournful and nostalgic, a scarred landscape of restaurants that can’t stay afloat, potholes that don’t get fixed, and bodies that don’t get buried. By contrast, MTV is showcasing a New Orleans that is tentatively getting back on its feet, a city ripe for tourists who want drunken nights on Bourbon Street, live music, and women who will bare their breasts for trinkets. Sonny might not approve of MTV’s version of New Orleans, but beloved New Orleans trumpeter Kermit Ruffins clearly does—he pops up several times during the season premiere.

Furthermore, since filming of the series wrapped in April, just before the devastating Gulf oil spill, this season of The Real World depicts a New Orleans frozen in time, wholly unaware of the disaster about to be unleashed on its shores. After watching a sobering series like Treme this winter, followed by the devastating coverage of the oil spill throughout the spring, it’s comforting to spend the summer with this tourist’s vision of New Orleans: where the beignets are hot, the Mardi Gras beads are flying, and everyone is dancing, happily, to “When the Saints Go Marching In.”

Not so in Treme. David Simon is finally giving musicians their due. Certainly there is a degree of celebration going on here (note the enumerable appearances by famous and not-so-famous New Orleans musicians). Indeed, Simon has noted in interviews his desire to demonstrate how the culture embodied by New Orleans residents was irrepressible after the flood—that is, people had to participate in the cultural expressions that are central to who they are as members of this community. [Side note: an irrepressible spirit was also central to the characters on The Wire, but it certainly had a darker, less joyous dimension than this one].

But here Simon is giving us more than just a feel-good, touristy celebration of New Orleans’ musical heritage a la Bourbon Street and Dixieland jazz. He is treating musicians and musical performances with respect (perhaps too much so for viewers who don’t enjoy jazz and may feel burdened by the resulting narrative “rupture”). Sunday night’s episode (“Shallow Water, Oh Mama”) is a case in point. Across four storylines and sets of characters—as well as at least four musical styles—each musician is seen fighting for respect on his or her own terms as musicians and artists, while maintaining respect for “the tradition” (as jazz musicians are wont to say). Big Chief Lambreaux is determined to put his tribe back together, including rehearsing by candlelight in his decimated bar sans FEMA trailer. Both Annie and Sonny yearn for more than whoring themselves to tourists for coins with yet another rendition of “Saints.” Antoine Batiste needs a gig desperately, but refuses to succumb to the soul-crushing imperative of high-society Mardis Gras gigs and their placid and safe versions of “Take the ‘A’ Train.” And Lambreaux’s son, New York trumpeter Delmond, keeps pushing back against the need for all New Orleans musicians to “kick it old school,” demanding instead that his favored brand of post-bop jazz be given the respect it deserves as a serious art form (not to serve as just another form of booty shakin’, beer swilling music). [Side note two: Simon simultaneously offers up real life versions of these tensions between jazz styles, including traditional N.O. trumpeter Kermit Ruffins and post-bop alto saxophonist Donald Harrison as actors in this drama].

With perhaps the exception of the Indian tribe, these are experiences that all professional jazz musicians can relate to—the imperative of economic survival and what that means for the production of “music;” the reality of performing before the masses and their need for little more than a soundtrack to go about their primary concerns of jabbering incessantly or attempting to get laid; playing music that has become so cliché it is incapable of stirring the soul; and feeling the desire to say “fuck this shit” and stand up and play the tune the way it is supposed to be played. With little interest here in entering the discussions of “authenticity” and “realism” in Simon’s work, let me simply say that finally, dramatic narrative television is giving music, musical performance, and musicians their (long over)due respect.  And its been a long time coming.

The CBS sports commentator who concluded, “Tonight the City of New Orleans embraced football,” doesn’t know the first thing about television reception.  On Superbowl Sunday 2010, viewers saw how a football team has embraced a city and its culture for decades.  Let me give some context.

First, this is how we watched the game.  Gold lamé and tutus, and the women dressed up too.  At the cincher play, an interception returned for a 74-yard touchdown, Deutsches Haus turned off the TV audio and played “When the Saints Come Marchin’ In” for a carnival parade of kings and queens, nuns and burlesque fairies waving white handkerchiefs high.  Mardi Gras, for the uninitiated, is a season here, not a day.  We’d been dressed out since morning for the four Sunday parades, including the all-dog Krewe of Barkus, strolling aptly to “When the Dogs Go Barking In.”

Television didn’t unify us.  The city has been on a high since the election results rolled in 15-hours earlier.  For the first time in recent memory, voters crossed racial lines en masse to elect a white mayor and a multiracial city council.  Television coverage of the city since Katrina has stressed divisions, ignoring the hybrid spaces and collaborative times that form a historically public culture.

Then, we danced downtown.  We took the “neutral ground,” a local word for the median that dates to colonial days as the place where French and Spaniards could meet without a turf scuffle.  In the street-turned-parking-lot, a black woman of maybe 60 years jumped out of her sedan and met in a jubilant squeeze with my towering white guy friend.  It was the first of many hugs, kisses, and high-fives with complete strangers that night.

Over the past four decades, the Saints became part of a public culture that erupts in New Orleans, a gumbo roux (locals, please pardon the cliché) that spills into the rue citywide.

This was the New Orleans I have always known, the one that drew me here before Katrina and the one that has kept me here.