It's not TV, it's HBO -- and AMC!

Following The Wire and Generation Kill, both the best of their kind, with the new HBO series, Treme (2010, MC-87), David Simon continues his mission to immerse us in front-line environments, allowing us gradually to come to a rounded view of a complex situation.  Here it’s New Orleans post-Katrina, or more specifically, the Treme district of the city, fount of music in all its local variety.  Much of each episode is given over to extended performances, but since music looms so large in the life of all, those performances are also story-telling and character-delineating.  As one tangential character sums it up, “Sex is sex.  But music, that’s personal.”  At the end of the first season of ten episodes, I’m finally getting past thinking of Wendell Pierce and Clarke Peters as the beloved “Bunk” and “Lester,” and knowing them as scuffling saxophonist Antoine Batiste and “Indian Chief” Albert Lambreaux.  Likewise, other familiar faces inhabit their roles and revolve through the intersecting stories, until they are at one with their characters:  Steve Zahn as the flaky but impassioned DJ; Kim Dickens as a chef struggling to revive her restaurant after the flood; Khandi Alexander as Bunk’s -- I mean Antoine’s – ex, who runs a bar and enlists public defender Melissa Leo to track down her brother, who was lost in the penal system during the disaster; John Goodman as Leo’s husband, a novelist and Tulane professor who becomes an internet celebrity for his impassioned YouTube pleas for the restoration of the Big Easy; and last but far from least, Lucia Micarelli as the amazing streetcorner fiddler with the druggy partner.  Again, Simon works that permeable membrane between fiction and reality, with many musicians and other New Orleans celebrities appearing as themselves, while exploring the intersections of class and race, history and politics, art and community.  For me, David Simon can do no wrong; for you – well, you’ll have to see for yourself.   

While Treme represents a comeback for HBO original series, AMC continues its hot streak with a just-completed third stellar season of Breaking Bad (2010, MC-89), leading soon to another of Mad Men.  While acknowledging that it will not appeal to all, I highly recommend Vince Gilligan’s series for its intelligent and stylish blend of grisly humor, twisty plotting , great character acting, local color and universal themes.  Taking a page from The Sopranos in mixing crime suspense with family drama, Breaking Bad is anchored by the Emmy-winning performance of Bryan Cranston in the role of a high school chemistry in Albuquerque, whose life starts to break bad, taking him down darker and darker paths, as his knowledge alchemizes into a major crystal-meth operation.  Aaron Paul also shines as the sorcerer’s apprentice.  Bob Odenkirk is fantastic as the sleazy lawyer who enables their criminal operations, and Giancarlo Esposito is steely and persuasive as the third season’s rival drug kingpin.  Anna Gunn is also strong as Cranston’s wife, along with great bit players along the way.  Continuously surprising, Breaking Bad maintains suspense and suspends judgment in a manner that shocks (and amuses!) while retaining credibility.  We sustain some undercurrent of empathy even as our familiar characters become more and more evil.  After a second season so tightly plotted that a mysterious scene that appears before the opening credits of the first episode does not get explained till the end of the final episode, this season Gilligan and his writers delighted in painting themselves into corners, and then surprising themselves and us with how they got out, along with daring tangents like a Beckett-flavored playlet with just the two leads and a fly caught in an hermetically sealed lab.

Though HBO series may have fallen short lately, the network continues to score with original movies.  Though not quite up to the level of Temple Grandin or Grey Gardens, You Don’t Know Jack (2010, MC-79) certainly ranks with the better films of the year.  Considering that it’s directed by Barry Levinson and stars Al Pacino, with support from the likes of Susan Sarandon and John Goodman (again), this film should have easily found theatrical release, but would not even have been made these days without the support of a patron like HBO.   Far from the last word on Jack Kevorkian – in fact, HBO itself has a documentary coming out soon – this film does a service in airing the issues of euthanasia associated with “Dr. Death” in an unsensational way, with important questions raised and left open.  Pacino is excellent in that he is a little less Pacino than usual, and believably the crazy-sane Kevorkian.