ABSTRACT
When Hurricane Katrina hit the US Gulf Coast in August 2005, floodwaters breached the levees that protected New Orleans; 80 percent of the city was flooded, severely damaging 182,000 homes. A total of 90,000 square miles of the Gulf Coast were devastated and approximately 1,800 people were killed. On April 11, 2010, a few months short of Katrina’s fifth anniversary, HBO aired the first episode of Treme, a drama set in New Orleans three months after the storm, which chronicles the lives of multiple characters struggling to re-inhabit the storm-damaged city.
The program is a fictional rendering of Katrina and the aftermath, but one inextricably tied to actual events and their historical sequencing through time. Following the genre of Dramatic Realism, the show was significant because media researchers demonstrated that initial coverage of Katrina was inaccurate, misleading, and sensationalized, dominated by themes of anarchy in which the residents, particularly poor African Americans, were portrayed as criminals. This has been identified a “disaster myth” frame through which crisis is associated with social chaos, accompanied by looting anddeviant behavior. These stories are now clearly understood to be false. This paper views Treme’s narrative as a significant intervention in that discursive trajectory.
Treme offered a counter-narrative to initial news coverage by recounting the disaster from a humanistic perspective from the point of view of the victims. Real, composite, or invented characters weave through the battered fragments that constitute the story of a humanitarian disaster and its traumatic consequences to human life. Treme critiqued previous formulations, reinventing the story and became a reference point for subsequent media coverage. In an age of hybrid genres and media convergence, dramatic events will inevitably be rendered across a broad spectrum that straddles fiction and nonfiction, ultimately influencing memory and understanding. The way we memorialize this humanitarian disaster will have a profound influence on our public responses to future crises and may help avoid the types of demonization and racism that lead to injustice in an age of increasing environmental and human caused dislocations.
