Treme

Are you someone who knows that you need to know more about the impacts of disasters but are a bit overwhelmed figuring out how to tackle it? Never fear – in this edition of #22 for ’22 I have a suggestion that requires you to just watch an awesome TV series that has an absolute banger of a soundtrack.

Treme is a HBO TV series that was first released in 2010. It follows the lives of a series of characters in New Orleans post Hurricane Katrina. These characters all have very different lives, and the show demonstrates the big and little ways disasters affect the lives of people in the years that follow. The storytelling is great, the concepts are subtle and well woven and the soundtrack is one that you will not be able to resist tapping your feet to as you watch. It is sad and joyful and funny and heartbreaking and best of all you can completely justify hunkering down and watching it as professional development (when series 1 became available in Australia, my colleague John Richardson hosted a team building Treme night complete with homemade gumbo, cornbread and American beer).

In Australia you can stream Treme on a few different platforms (and it sometimes pops up on SBS on demand), or you can go old school and get the DVDs from a lot of libraries.