Recovering from hard times in the Big Easy

Pick of the day: Treme showcase, 12.20pm

Wendell Pierce As Antoine Batiste In Treme 4 On Showcase Picture: Supplied

THE final season of this acclaimed series, David Simon and Eric Overmyer’s magical piece of long-form storytelling for HBO, takes us back to New Orleans months after Barack Obama has just been elected to the White House, giving entrenched residents of this city, still recovering from its battering by Hurricane Katrina, reason for optimism.

These last chapters take place in the shadow of the historic presidential election, still slowly and musically unravelling Treme’s many plots and subplots, quietly shaping them in the spirit of the past. If you’ve been following the show you’ll know how it will end — as in Simon’s The Wire, life and America will go on.

As Cian Gaffney writes on the HBO website, the series is deliberately unstructured, a kind of quasi-documentary in which characters also act as conduits for ideas and different forms of culture, each with their own quirks. Some — especially the musicians — are not characters at all but the real people. “The show is not better or worse than other shows for this reason, it just is,” Gaffney says.

Yet for every Batiste, Lambreaux, McAlary and Desautel who hopes to improve their lot or just return to a sense of pre-Katrina normalcy, others are intent on capitalising on the city’s vulnerability and suffocating its culture.

And keepers of the Creole flame struggle to make their voices heard over the din of construction and local politics. If you’ve never watched it, are not familiar with its characters or its multiple plot lines, just watch these last chapters — or press the record button — of what has been a beguiling set of short stories just to soak up a sense of place almost unparalleled in TV.

Crime writer James Lee says: “In Louisiana we love the idealism of Don Quixote, but we have always made room for his libertine, hedonistic sidekick, Sancho Panza.’’

Simon and Overmyer nail it, capturing the flavour and rich heritage of the city, highlighting its role in the interconnected personal stories of those who endured in Katrina’s wake.