Watch Treme Season 2 Episode 1 Accentuate the Positive Online Premiere Stream : Season two of the David Simon/Eric Overmyer New Orleans drama "Treme" will start April 24, HBO announced Thursday. The cycle will consist of 11 episodes and air on Sunday nights on television's top channel. Jon Seda, one-time member of the ensemble for NBC's "Homicide: Life on the Street," will join the cast. David Morse and India Ennenga, who appeared in the first season, become regulars. Anthony Bourdain, food writer and TV show host, becomes a member of the "Treme" writing team.
Here's the backdrop to the start of season two offered by HBO in its release:
It’s more than a year since Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath. The national spotlight on the Crescent City has dimmed, and residents are finding it harder than ever to rebuild their lives. Some have become expatriates in distant cities. The insurance checks that never arrived for homeowners were followed by the bureaucratic nightmare that was the Road Home program, and a land-grab is underway as developers and disaster capitalists press their advantage. Crime and drug use are up, and corruption and graft are endemic, with civic institutions unable to counter any of it.
And yet the culture of New Orleans somehow endures.
A year after Katrina, with most of New Orleans still on its knees, police sergeant Terry Colson (David Morse) describes the entire city as "depressed, anxious, angry . . . everybody is out of their minds." But not newcomers like Nelson Hildago (Jon Seda) who arrives from Dallas because there's a lot of easy money to be made for contractors with the right connections. Meanwhile, much has changed.
Melodic as ever amid the overall pain and disappointments, Treme remains tremendous as it returns for a second season on HBO.
Paired on Sunday nights with the new Game of Thrones (already renewed for its Season 2) Treme likewise is a series that's set in another world. Except that this also is the hard knocks real world of New Orleans, the voodoo palace of jazz, blues, revelry and 2005's near wipeout from Hurricane Katrina.
Treme (9 p.m. central) picks up on All Saints Day, 2006 -- "Fourteen Months Later." Executive producer David Simon (The Wire) remains intent on both celebrating The Big Easy and keeping Katrina in play as a not-to-be-forgotten supporting character.
"We are following the actual timeline of post-Katrina New Orleans as a means of understanding what happened -- and what didn't happen -- when an American city suffered a near-death experience," Simon says in HBO publicity materials.
Sunday's first of 11 episodes begins with a kid carrying on the city's musical heritage by haltingly practicing on his horn. His mother has shooed him away, so he takes to the streets while painstakingly playing the same notes. It's an evocative, symbolic and perfectly composed start, with the kid walking past a graveyard whose population has swelled in recent months. The music of Treme remains front and center, whether from clubs or street corners. It's reason enough to listen/watch, but the denizens and their evolving stories are great hooks as well.
One larger-than-life character from last season, John Goodman's profane, proselytizing Creighton Bernette, is gone but not forgotten after committing suicide. His wife, Toni (Oscar winner Melissa Leo), a crusading attorney, and their teenage daughter, Sofia (India Ennenga), are left to pick up the pieces. Sofia copes by copping a 'tude, shutting out her mother and carrying on with some of her father's Internet rants against the government's calcified response to Katrina.
Antoine Batiste (Wendell Pierce), Treme's quintessential man with a horn, continues to play gigs wherever he can get them while hoping to someday front his own band. Girlfriend Desiree (Phyllis Montana-Leblanc) sticks with him, and the shorthand dialogue of their relationship is one of the series' many delights.
