I caught up with this third season Treme last week, and among other things that struck me about the show—particularly that television shows about music are always going to be viscerally satisfying in a way that even the most beautifully-shot shows about food can never be—that the show really clicked for me this season, and distinguished itself from David Simon’s other shows, through its female characters. I wrote about two of them, LaDonna and Janette, as part of a piece on television’s difficult women for the Daily Beast late last week:

I was initially frustrated by Janette Desautel’s reaction to the opportunity to open a large, well-backed restaurant back in New Orleans. Her disregard for human-resources briefings and her distaste for even the prospect of profit margins seemed petulant to me early in the season. But as the restaurant opened, her temper tantrums started to make sense as the reasonable-sounding restrictions began to make it harder for Janette to run her kitchen, manage her staff in a way that was effective, turn out dishes that became so in demand that it was impossible to fulfill all the orders and still keep quality high, or even hold a benefit for a fellow, if less-glamorous, New Orleans restaurateur.

The experiences of that woman, LaDonna Batiste-Williams, raise the question of what it even means to be strong when the world punishes you for being cool and composed. After surviving a brutal sexual assault and struggling to reopen her family bar in the aftermath of Katrina, LaDonna spent much of this season waiting for her assailant’s trial to begin and trying to push back against demands of protection money. Her rudeness to her husband’s upper-crust relatives or willingness to cuss out the man extorting her may not be badass, but they’re an assertion of dignity to people who are all too willing to peel it off her like a layer of skin. And while LaDonna may never get the baseball bat she keeps behind the bar out in time to chase off the man trying to intimidate her into withdrawing her rape charges, or to keep him from burning her bar, her failures don’t make her weak or flailing.

I also thought Treme did an excellent job this season with two of its much more subtle storylines this year, too: Annie (Lucia Micarelli), a young musician beginning her rise towards the big time, and Sofia (India Ennenga), the daughter of civil rights lawyer Toni Bernette. Annie’s trajectory is outwardly smooth: she signs with an agent who keeps his promises to her, she begins touring and her work is well-received, her album comes out towards the end of the season. What lends the story drama is how her success is received by the people around her. Her mother (Isabella Rosselini), devalues Annie’s success because she isn’t performing classical music, and makes little effort to learn more about the blues tradition Annie’s working in, even as her father makes some efforts. And even worse, her boyfriend Davis, a DJ, is pursuing his career in parallel to Annie’s, and is so distracted by his own dreams that he doesn’t even notice that Annie’s success is happening. Davis is more musically and politically ambitious than Annie is—while she aspires to record some of her old friend Harley’s songs, he’s trying to convince his aunt to fund a scathing opera about Katrina and New Orleans’ musical legacy. But when he finds success, it’s with the musical equivalent of a temper tantrum that goes viral, cussing out his aunt, and Annie, or so it seems, in the process. The two of them break up without a big, bruising fight: neither of them needs to speak out loud the obvious truth that Davis will always be jealous, and Annie’s simply grown beyond his parochialism. By the end of the season, Annie’s performing at Jazz Fest, and Davis watches her, invisible, from the crowd: he finally sees her and her successes, but her world is now too large for him to stand out in it.

Sofia’s story is somewhat more dramatic, but it’s still handled as if the human scale of it is important and worthy. In retaliation for her mother’s investigations into the New Orleans Police Department’s actions during the storm, Sofia becomes the regular subject of traffic stops, warnings from cops, even an arrest for being underage at a party where alcohol is being served. Sofia is doing her best to be a good kid, and to protect both her family and her mother’s work by not getting into trouble—Toni’s surprise when she finds out that Sofia has broken up with an older boyfriend she thought was a bad influence on her daughter is a lovely example of a mother coming face-to-face with her daughter’s maturity and being pleasantly surprised by what she finds there. But it’s New Orleans, and Sofia is a teenager. Some joy and some trouble are inevitable. And when Toni decides to send Sofia off to finish her senior year in Florida, it’s both the right thing and painfully unfair. When Sofia comes home for a visit and finds Terry Colson, an NOPD officer who becomes her mother’s new boyfriend, drinking juice in his boxers, the polarization between them is reversed. Their conversation may consist of Sofia telling Terry that Florida sucks. But from Sofia’s face, she’s unexpectedly pleased that her mother’s found love, or something like it, in the wake of her father’s suicide. Both of them are growing, and for the first time, capable of recognizing it in each other and being happy for each other, as if they are friends as well as mother and daughter.
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It’s the top-ten list time of year, and as I’m catching up on some shows and sifting through my list of favorites, I’ve been struck by how many fantastic performances we’ve seen in television this year. While some are obvious continuations of dominant streaks, like Bryan Cranston and Aaron Paul’s turns on Breaking Bad, or Tina Fey’s embrace of happiness on 30 Rock, there are some truly astonishing turns going down on shows that almost no one is watching, or in shows that are so crowded with flashy performances that these are in danger of being overlooked. Here are five of the actors whose work hit me hardest this year:

1. Khandi Alexander, Treme: I ran a little behind Treme this season, but catching up on it this week, I regretted that. Much of that regret comes from how marvelous Alexander is as LaDonna Batiste-Williams. As a bar owner trying to keep her place alive, and determined to see through the prosecution of the men who robbed and sexually assaulted her, Alexander is by turns moody and joyful. Whether she’s feuding with her husband’s wealthy family, cooly cussing out a man demanding protection money from her, finally taking the stand in her much-delayed trial, or developing a tender friendship with Albert Lambreaux, Alexander’s been given the chance to be as complete a female character as I’ve seen on television in a long time. “Burnt me out for nothing,” she said in the season finale when her case ended in a heartbreaking mistrial. But it’s not nothing to those of us who have been watching at home.

2. Andra Fuller, The L.A. Complex: It is a source of considerable sadness to me that so few people found it in themselves to watch The L.A. Complex, an incredibly sharp ensemble show about what it actually takes to become successful in the entertainment industry. The cast is strong up and down the lineup, but if there was justice in the business, this should have been a breakout performance for Andra Fuller as closeted rapper Kaldrick King. King is one of the most sexual and emotional gay characters ever to appear on network television, and as he battered a young lover, made amends with him and reconnected with his father, and began a relationship with a handsome young lawyer who gave him the courage to come out, Fuller acted the hell out of every scene.

3. Eliza Coupe, Happy Endings: I spoke to Eliza Coupe earlier this season about her approach to physical comedy, playing uptight, and being half of one of only a few interracial couples on television. Since then, her performance as Jane Kerkovich-Williams has only gotten deeper and funnier. Whether she’s going overboard in enjoying being the breadwinner in her family, sneaking a perfectly-prepared turkey into her sister’s house to ensure that Thanksgiving isn’t a disaster, or revisiting the origin of her relationship with her husband Brad, Jane’s exploded the idea that being controlling means you have to be a humorless bitch, and I love her for it.

4. Charles Dance and Maisie Williams, Game of Thrones: Peter Dinklage probably has Game of Thrones‘ acting awards slot locked up as long as Tyrion Lannister lives. But that’s too bad, because Dance and Williams spent this year putting on the best cross-generational acting clinic on television as Tywin Lannister and Arya Stark. They’re people who should be mortal enemies, but, isolated from their families and in service to larger causes, find themselves understanding each other. I could watch the two of them dance around each other in Harrenhal’s great hall for ten hours a year.

5. Walton Goggins, Justified: Goggins, who’s been everywhere from Sons of Anarchy to Lincoln this year, probably has the best shot of anyone on this list of scoring an actual Emmy nomination. As Boyd Crowder, Goggins has taken an archetype, a racist redneck, and infused the role with an injection of coal-country rage, tenderness towards his surrogate father Arlo Givens, and a spiky relationship with Arlo’s son Raylan, who is his sometime-enemy, sometime-ally. I can’t wait to see where their rivalry heads next. Goggins was good on The Shield, but I think he’s even better on Justified.

Emily Nussbaum, the television critic at the New Yorker, writes in an even-handed review of David Simon’s HBO series about New Orleans, Treme, which was just renewed for a shortened fourth season, than an episode of the show “made me wonder if, rather than a novel or a movie, a TV show could be a poem.” It’s a perfect way of encapsulating why Treme is both important and sometimes infuriating: it’s a show that challenges our conception of what a television show can be, but that may end up reaffirming our basic demands of the form.

In another television show, if I wished the dialogue would stop so I could listen to a musician finish out a song, watch an artist stitch beads into a badge, or a cook plate a dish, that would be a grave sign of trouble for that show. Given the relative pedestrian nature of much television cinematography and music,Treme stands out for its the quality of its musical performances, its attention to the kinds of details of craft that don’t always drive plots, but that can give an audience profound and vicarious sensual pleasure. I could hang out in LaDonna’s (Khandi Alexander) bar for an entire afternoon watching Albert’s Mardi Gras Indians practice their routines, as they do this season, or at a music showcase watching Annie try out new songs as she prepares to record a studio album. In an episode in the middle of this season, Toni (Melissa Leo) and her daughter Sofia (India Ennenga) go to a performance of Waiting for Godot at the point where the levees were breached. As moving as it was to watch a man in the audience declare Godot isn’t coming, to see Toni tear up at his anger and pain, I almost would have rather been there with them in the audience, experiencing the play for myself. The art Treme puts on screen is almost enough for me to not need the plots and characterization that surround it.

Treme isn’t alone in playing with the potential of television. Breaking Bad, in particular, plays with cinematography much more aggressively than Treme. But that show’s dramatic color saturation, shot composition, and unnerving images are in service of the show’s clear moral throughlines. And Breaking Bad has always paired its striking cinematography with sleek, efficient storytelling. If Breaking Bad‘s A, B, and C storylines are hanks of hair being plaited together into a smooth braid, Treme‘s much larger cast are threads on a loom, showing occasional flashes of jewel color, but often just providing the supporting warp and weft to get us to one performance to the next.

That’s not to say that there aren’t engaging characters or moving moments in Treme outside of the musical performances. There’s joy to be had in watching Antoine Baptiste grousing about a cab fare he believes resulted from an inefficient route, telling the driver “It’s basic geometry, bro…You need to get with the hypotenuse. Don’t believe me, believe Pythagoras. He invented the sides of this shit,” or Ladonna seeking affirmation from a customer, asking him “What do you think about this here? This bar. My bar,” only to get back: “It’s here. And so am I.”

And the Treme is dense and smart on its core theme, how New Orleans alternately neglects and mythologizes itself, and how its most creative tendencies sometimes undermine its chances for success. In this week’s season three premiere, as Davis McAlary (Steve Zahn) takes a group of tourists to what he’s trying to tell them are important sites in New Orleans musical history, they become progressively more disgusted with the disarray of the stops along the way. “You mean they can’t manage to clean up a park after two years?” one asks him. “Did you people ever actually preserve anything of note?” another wants to know. They’re not wrong. Meanwhile, Delmond Lambreaux (Rob Brown), who recorded a well-received album that combines jazz with his father’s Indian tribe, gets asked “Where in your imagination did all that come from?” by a purported fan who’s totally unfamiliar with the history of the music he’s enjoying. Next week, Antoine, now teaching music, tells a student “Jennifer, you sound good, girl. You got that real New Orleans riff.” But regretfully, he tells her to get back in synch with the other members of his marching band. “This here is about playing in unison,” he tells her. “When the time comes, you can let that rip.”

And that’s sort of Treme‘s problem. The show isn’t willing to shrug off narrative conventions entirely and spin off into sensory experience. But on the ground, it’s pulled in too many directions, and as a result characters have to tell what they don’t have time to show. Television may have dramatically expanded the emotional and moral weight it’s able to convey in the last decade and a half, and thanks to the widespread availability of cheap flatscreen televisions and prestige cable budgets, television productions are more visually ambitious than they’ve ever been. But Treme is a reminder that for all of these advances, television remains primarily a narrative medium, and we’re a long way from the show that’s really ready to let it rip and step out of line.

David Simon has never had much patience for the vultures in any economic system he’s examined (with the possible exception of Omar, the roguish robber of drug dealers in The Wire), and he’s positively appalled by the idea that Mitt Romney’s declaration that he’s never paid less than thirteen percent of his income in taxes constitutes an appropriate defense of Romney’s approach to his finances and his fiscal obligations to his government and fellow citizens:

Am I supposed to congratulate this man? Thank him for his good citizenship? Compliment him for being clever enough to arm himself with enough tax lawyers so that he could legally minimize his obligations?

Thirteen percent. The last time I paid taxes at that rate, I believe I might still have been in college. If not, it was my first couple years as a newspaper reporter. Since then, the paychecks have been just fine, thanks, and I don’t see any reason not to pay at the rate appropriate to my earnings, given that I’m writing the check to the same government that provided the economic environment that allowed for such incomes.

Simon may be impatient with Obama, particularly on issues of the drug war and mass incarceration, but if he decides that the present commander in chief is preferable to a guy whose attitudes indicate that, as Simon puts it, “This republic is just about over, isn’t it?” I imagine the Obama administration wouldn’t say no if Simon wanted to shoot some ads for the campaign. Treme comes back in September, and Simon might have some free time once it’s in the can. Just a thought.