In “Imaginary Cities: America,” Joyce Carol Oates asked, “If the city is a text, how shall we read it?”Footnote 1 While US cities have been variously mythologized, Los Angeles – imagined as both Hollywood dream and urban dystopia – always epitomized the apocalyptic in crime fiction, films noir and disaster movies. New Orleans has been traditionally celebrated as the nation's most European city and for its cultural richness as a racially diverse city on the Caribbean rim, its vulnerability to hurricane and storm damage the basis for its reputation for living life for today and for laisser le bons temps rouler. Now New Orleans has superseded LA as the nation's exceptional city of catastrophe. Indeed, the photograph that opens Mike Davis's Ecology of Fear: Los Angeles and the Imagination of Disaster (1998) may be all too easily read now as representative: urban streets are submerged and cars float free as a lone man wades thigh-deep in floodwater, an ironic subheading stating “Apocalypse Theme Park.”Footnote 2 Since 29 August 2005, imagery of flooding and disaster has brooded over New Orleans and images of an Africanized New Orleans have dominated in the aftermath of the hurricane that dispersed the city's poor and predominantly African American population. Conspiracy theories that had always fed the “city that care forgot” filtered through narratives which acted as indictment: parables of institutional neglect of “Third World” proportions – an epithet that gained as much currency as “refugee” in media tales of the city's collapse.
Revenants of slavery, the southern plantation complex and the idea of New Orleans as a colony within the US have infused post-Katrina stories. Judith Jackson Fossett, for example, argues, “The city post-Katrina has been personified as one of those many African American women in search of succor at the Superdome, sold down the river of national domestic policy and debate” whereby the storm becomes “a racialized and feminized anthropomorphism.”Footnote 3 British journal The Economist featured an African American woman on the cover of its 10 September issue who was taken to personify “The Shaming of America.” Her face is wet with tears and her torn T-shirt reads simply “New Orleans.” Eric Gay's close-up of an elderly African American woman, Mrs. Milvertha Hendricks, wrapped in an American flag as she sits huddled in the Superdome, is now iconic. This image from the Katrina Exposed exhibition forms the cover picture of David Dante Troutt's collection After the Storm: Black Intellectuals Explore the Meaning of Hurricane Katrina (2007), for example. These ways of reading the city metaphorically have been contextualized in scholarship by Fossett and others, with Derrick Price reading Mrs. Hendricks in relation to Dorothea Lange's classic photograph of Mrs. Florence Thompson in the Depression-era South, as an example of how such illustrations are testament to the instability of genres and practices in contemporary image-making.Footnote 4 But novelists and filmmakers have also coopted different images of disaster and terror in more macabre post-Katrina narratives which romance and sensationalize the city. It is surprising, therefore, that we are yet to pay sustained attention to those genre fictions that script a fantasy in which New Orleans must be read as lawless, violent and dangerous. This essay examines the ways in which stories told in novels and prime-time television shows, across the interlocking genres of cop show and crime thriller, have coalesced as an anthology of narratives in which the city's breakdown is relieved only by the resilience of its sleuthing protagonists who bear witness to the city's devastation as they battle its crime. It focusses on representations of the New Orleans Police Department (NOPD) in particular as exemplary of tensions explicit in the city's regeneration.
The New Orleans crime and disaster narrative has a long history, of course, underpinning tales of the city from The Mysteries of New Orleans (1854) to the fantasy world of Anne Rice's novels where crime is endemic to the survival of vampires. Annie Proulx's North American epic Accordion Crimes (1993) opens with the largest mass lynching in US history of eleven Sicilian immigrants in New Orleans in 1891, while John Gregory Brown's novel Decorations in a Ruined Cemetery (1994) begins with the collapse of the Lake Pontchartrain Causeway during which “the whole world [is] thrown off-balance like a gyroscope hammered into the wrong shape.”Footnote 5 The young girl who witnesses it is haunted by her family's proximity to death, especially when a car in front of theirs careens off the bridge, but her father will return to the event only as a single detail in the colourfully “eccentric” and “amusing” history of New Orleans. This episode epitomizes a tension that is also made manifest in post-Katrina crime fictions.
Movies focusing on crime and criminals, and police and pandemonium in mean and labyrinthine streets, have traditionally enjoyed strong box office appeal, from Panic in the Streets (1950), in which a plague-carrying immigrant (Jack Palance) is pursued through the dark New Orleans night by environmental health officer (Richard Widmark), to Déjà Vu (2006), the first Hollywood movie shot in post-Katrina New Orleans, in which the Alvin Stumpf ferry is blown up by terrorists and an Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms investigator (Denzel Washington) discovers that a science fiction-styled opportunity exists to reverse time to prevent the murder of five hundred passengers, in lieu of those killed during Katrina – the hurricane having been elided from this particular film narrative except for the moment when a banner on the ferry boat proclaiming “Katrina Only Made Us Stronger” goes up in flames.Footnote 6
While the disaster movie is a staple of national filmmaking, the crime novel has become ever more closely regionalized; the most local of genres, it remains fixed in place. In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina there has been a proliferation of post-disaster crime novels, some by established Louisiana writers such as James Lee Burke and a few plundering the most gruesome elements to create baroque plots, as in Bob Adamov's Promised Land (2006), marketed as “Vatican Intrigue Meets Hurricane Katrina”; Erica Spindler's Last Known Victim (2007); and Davis Temple's self-published Voodoo Storm: Hurricane Katrina, Death and Mystery in New Orleans (2008). Burke's The Tin Roof Blowdown was a natural subject for the writer who has devoted some twenty years to publishing intensely moral detective novels, some fifteen set in New Iberia parish in which former NOPD officer and sheriff's deputy Dave Robicheaux and sidekick Clete Purcel make frequent trips into the city to solve its crimes. Novelist Nicholas Wroe asserted, “This was Burke's patch and it is difficult to think of anyone better placed to take on the biblical scale of the tragedy and gauge the personal and political depths of the scandal.”Footnote 7 His depiction of Katrina is overlaid by memories of the Mississippi Flood of 1927 and Hurricane Betsy in 1965, and so while Katrina is acknowledged as ripping apart the city of Clete Purcel's childhood, this rupture in its history is located, to some extent, in terms of previous disasters in which the poor suffered disproportionately in order that it may be expressed as “an American watershed in the history of political cynicism.”Footnote 8 But even Burke falls prey to cliché in straining to express the magnitude of the event he repeatedly pronounces indescribable (27, 372). New Orleans is compared to a bombed-out World War II city (318) and suppressed tension in the faces of the NOPD to that Robicheaux witnessed in the faces of pilots during the war in Vietnam (113). One analogy suggests that the damage was worse than that inflicted on Hiroshima, thereby comparing purpose-built murderous technology to a natural phenomenon aggravated to the level of a phenomenal human disaster by federal neglect. The seductiveness of imagery that fed the most lurid news stories leeches into even the most assured of crime novels, although, finally, Burke returns to Robicheaux's Catholicism for a simile that may be redemptive: the dead are like broken Communion wafers lit by heavenly light in the immense Communion chalice that is the New Orleans basin.
Burke was not the first to romance Katrina in this genre. Tony Dunbar's Tubby Dubbonet series locates its sleuthing-lawyer protagonist in the city when the hurricane hits. In Tubby Meets Katrina (2006), published nine months after the storm, Tubby rescues people in his boat; he spends time in the Convention Center with a gun in his lap; with a white female survivor, he is ignored by police because “I guess we don't look like looters”;Footnote 9 and he swings from an adrenalin rush in which he feels “part of something glorious and big” (135) into a depressive fog within which he has “no right to personal happiness” and feels “more comfortable in the wreckage” (150). His daughter is pursued by a psychopath who so identifies with the storm's power and violence that he becomes “Katrina.” Reading the post-Katrina city emblematically through tales of sociopaths, looters, rapists and murderers, as Dunbar, Burke and others do, was both a convention of the genre and a departure for dramatizations of New Orleans.
When reading about the ravaged city in the crime genre, it is as if the hurricane brought with it a rupture in history that became the city's new originary moment, as Dave Robicheaux muses: “If we have a precedent for what happened in New Orleans, it's lost on me” (369). It has proved a turning point in crime mysteries over the last five years. Some reviewers fail to see this, with one asserting that “the romance of New Orleans for out-of-towners seems surprisingly unchanged in a half-century” and that one imagines Stanley Kowalski brooding on the periphery of Fox TV's K-Ville.Footnote 10 But when in 2008 Bertrand Tavernier adapted Burke's 1993 novel In the Electric Mist with the Confederate Dead for the screen, he set the film post-Katrina, as if any text produced after the storm is obligated to take note of this most meaningful originary moment. That assumption is so powerful that one writer, Holli Castillo, a public defender resident in New Orleans, chose to set her first crime mystery, Gumbo Justice (2009), before Katrina, perhaps in order to combat it. Crime writers, such as attorney–writer Dunbar, who works closely with the city's justice system, also do their part to rehabilitate the reputation of law enforcement agencies. Each novel includes hearsay or news reports of NOPD officers deserting but also includes a description of officers dedicated to fulfilling their duties. Herren's private eye is indebted to Venus and Blaine, a black-and-white duo, tireless though “tired and haggard”: “I knew they had neither looted nor stolen cars nor left the city … they'd both lost weight and their eyes looked hollow with fatigue.”Footnote 11 In a two-page preface to Promised Land, dedicated to the recipients of the New Orleans Metropolitan Crime Commission's Excellence in Law Enforcement Awards for acts during the storm, Bob Adamov writes, “The national criticism on the shortcomings of a few bad officers cannot cast a shadow on the Herculean efforts and unswerving dedication of the New Orleans Police Department's officers, who served with honor and distinction during the darkest hours of New Orleans' history.” He claims that while Katrina was not central to his story, it was too significant to avoid, so he “allow[s] it to interrupt the plot and throw some twists in the way.”Footnote 12 In a narrative populated by corrupt police officers and stereotyped Cajuns, investigative journalist Emerson Moore helps to solve the mystery of a doctor-turned-serial killer and uncovers a Vatican conspiracy that sought to blackmail Thomas Jefferson over the Louisiana Purchase.
In genre fictions about Hurricane Katrina, protagonists are typically NOPD officers (The Tin Roof Blowdown, K-Ville), law enforcement officials, private eyes in the days after Katrina made landfall (Tubby Meets Katrina, Murder in the Rues Chartres, Last Known Victim, Voodoo Storm), FBI investigators (CBS's Without a Trace) or forensic anthropologists (Fox TV's Bones). Witnesses to opportunistic crimes are stranded in a waterlogged wasteland. They perch on rooftops or hide in rising water or their unconscious reveals what they saw in nightmares and flashbacks. Flawed protagonists and desperate or violent criminals have their lives brought into sharp relief when they are pitted against the storm and the NOPD's role is pivotal in solving the mysteries thrown up in its wake.
It is axiomatic to remember that the city was represented in the press as lawless in the hurricane's aftermath, with looting, gangs and gun crime dominating reports, most of which were later revealed to have been wildly exaggerated urban myths. This media-made melodrama was a form of “cultural wreckage,” as New York Times reporter David Carr observed. Carr turns to Carl Smith's study of late nineteenth-century urban disasters in his effort to make sense of the “primordial appeal of the story of a city in chaos and people running loose.”Footnote 13 African Americans were portrayed as murderers and looters and descriptions took on the discourse of sensational fiction, in news reports like one in the Los Angeles Times describing the National Guard taking “positions on rooftops, scanning for snipers and armed mobs as seething crowds of refugees milled below, desperate to flee. Gunfire crackled in the distance.”Footnote 14 The same newspaper some days later analysed how Katrina had “taken a toll” on news accuracy and stated that reports that people were raped and murdered in the Convention Center were “dead wrong.”Footnote 15 But these impressions had already circulated, the problem summarized by correspondent Hugh Hewitt on Jim Lehrer's NewsHour when he asked,
Why was the media so eager and willing to circulate these stories? Is it because we were dealing with the urban underclass, largely black, and largely a community with which the elite media does not often deal? And as a result they were willing to believe stories about this community that they might not have given any credence to in a different situation?Footnote 16
Regardless of accuracy, post-Katrina stories took on the texture of crime genre clichés, and such images, in turn, find their way back into novels and TV drama.
In the days following the hurricane, CNN's Aaron Brown threw aside his script, overwhelmed by the sheer magnitude of the disaster, and reporter Anderson Cooper berated Louisiana Senator Mary Landrieux for seeming to ignore the horror he had been unable to tear his eyes from: rats gnawing at a dead woman's corpse on the street.Footnote 17 A similar image is referenced in the opening minutes of K-Ville and also finds place in The Tin Roof Blowdown when Clete tragically tries to conceal in an inverted cardboard box a woman who has died outside the Convention Center (35–36). Such scenes resonate in crime fiction as they resonate for those who witnessed them. Five years on, for example, NBC Nightly news anchor Brian Williams confided, “I can't shake the sight of a dead body on a major street corner next to the Superdome and how these people were failed by the government we entrust to protect us.”Footnote 18
As A. C. Thomas revealed in “Katrina's Hidden Race War” (2009), some post-Katrina New Orleans stories were as disturbing as crime fiction clichés. Gun-toting white vigilantes in “neighborhood watch” militia groups had perpetrated criminal acts like that which saw Donnell Herrington shot by white attackers for simply walking around in traditionally white Algiers Point in the days after the storm.Footnote 19 Post-Katrina fictions that focus on murder, rape and looting, such as The Tin Roof Blowdown, must inevitably also negotiate the racializing as well as the criminalizing of the city.
TV series Without a Trace and Bones dedicated episodes to Katrina. “The Calm Before” is an emotive exploration of the life-and-death choice made by a single man in a split second.Footnote 20 Fear that the thrashing about of the man he is rescuing will capsize the boat in which his children are protected forces Aaron Gibbs (Eriq La Salle) to push the man away. When he returns, the man is lost in the flood. The act causes a breach in the mind of Gibbs which he hopes may be healed by finding the man's son to hear his confession. But the son cannot accept his apology and another crime ensues in an unstable building the boy is looting when he leaves Gibbs trapped under rubble to die – like so many people hidden in collapsed buildings after the real catastrophe. Abandoning Gibbs as his father was abandoned makes for a neat framing device until Gibbs is rescued by the FBI's Jack Malone (Anthony La Paglia). But it also leaves the impression that television drama will continue to heap one Katrina crime on top of another. Even in the most unlikely instances, crime textures references to post-Katrina New Orleans, as for example in an episode of Heroes entitled “The Kindness of Strangers,” recalling Blanche DuBois's iconic line in A Streetcar Named Desire, when a character discovers her superhuman powers when the burger bar she works in is held up by disaffected “post-Katrina” robbers whom she overpowers single-handedly.Footnote 21
Bones, the crime and forensic series, devoted an episode to the tragedy in April 2006 entitled “The Man in the Morgue.”Footnote 22 It is a sensationalist exploitation tale of ritual murders for which Katrina is a diversion. Forensic anthropologist Dr. Temperance “Bones” Brennan has taken “vacation” from her post in Washington, DC to work in a temporary morgue helping to identify victims of the storm. After a gruesome forty-eight-hour shift “doing penance for FEMA,” she dines with an orderly who practises voodoo and the following day wakes up on the floor of her bathroom, beaten and bloody. The impression created is that she has been made to suffer “voodoo amnesia” to prevent her from discovering the identity of a murdered man who is finally revealed to be a well-loved voodoo priest. The episode is chock-full of conspiracy theory – the hurricane is posited as “voodoo Armageddon” – and conflict with the NOPD, as when a sceptical legal representative disdains Bones's search for the truth with, “There's no such thing as trying to help the NOPD. They will close the case as quickly and easily as they can.”
Without a Trace and Bones made fifty-minute drama out of New Orleans post-Katrina, but Fox TV's 2007 series K-Ville (the short form of “Katrinaville,” a term used to indicate the area affected most by the storm) was the first attempt to make sustained television drama out of the crisis. It was the idea of Peter Liguori, president of entertainment at Fox, who asked Jonathan Lisco, whose executive producing and writing had steered a successful course through NYPD Blue and The District, to steer this series to production. K-Ville was shot in 2006 and first aired in September 2007 but Fox pulled it after showing ten and shooting eleven out of a possible twenty-two-episode season.
To begin with, the very idea of K-Ville rang warning bells, as the Times-Picayune's Mark Lorando summarized: “A cop show focused on NOPD dysfunction couldn't be good for the city, could it?”Footnote 23K-Ville attempted to translate the hard and tragic facts of the disaster into a “cop show.” The TV cop series is a cultural form that has often been the scourge of tastemakers but has also been read as the epitome of quality television, as in the case of HBO's The Wire. The conventions of this particular “Katrina cop show” are investigated here for the extent to which they intersected with its critical reception. For example, K-Ville was condemned as exploitative, self-righteous and self-regarding, each criticism underlined as pretensions a cop show was deemed wise to avoid. It was criticized as a formulaic black-and-white buddy-cop show, even though this formula has been one of the most successful for cop series and for cop movies. One critic was most censorious in this regard, calling it “cheap pulp fiction.”Footnote 24K-Ville was censured for limiting its visual focus to the New Orleans that tourists have always known best, instead of those neighbourhoods devastated most by the storm. Each criticism harbours deep-seated assumptions about mass media and popular genres – about race and class fissures that have historically been read as most apparent in southern places, the burden of representation, and ideas of the “local” as they inform a national political crisis over the response to Katrina.
K-Ville is shot in a naturalistic mode with handheld cameras and frenetic editing conveying a sense of the instability of New Orleans in the aftermath of Katrina. It is carried by Anthony Anderson as Marlin Boulet, a veteran police officer, and Trevor Cobb (Cole Hauser) as his partner, new to the NOPD and a convicted felon who is hiding his past as a member of a criminal gang. The two sides of a city's “mean streets” are drawn into alliance in a bid to stem the city's crime, especially opportunistic responses to the catastrophe. Marlin Boulet is the moral centre of the drama serial and its moral compass. He helps Cobb hide the fact that he escaped his flooded jail cell at the height of the storm. This is also how psychopath Bonner Rivette, who conceives of himself as the embodiment of Katrina, escapes jail in Tubby Meets Katrina:
A few of the black uniforms returned and they were brave men. They earned twelve thousand dollars a year and they had families in danger somewhere. Still they were willing to venture into the swill and rescue the cats they were charged with keeping off the streets. (46)
In the pandemonium, Rivette floats away. There was no evacuation plan for the two thousand or so prisoners in Orleans Parish Prison or in parish jails in the vicinity. News media made comparisons with the treatment of those incarcerated in Abu Ghraib when stories of abandonment and malpractice during armed evacuations came to light, and a number of crime fictions, including The Tin Roof Blowdown, reference the plight of prisoners during the storm.
In K-Ville, Cobb saves himself only by allowing his cellmate to drown, an act that must be redeemed over ensuing episodes. Boulet supports his partner because he undergoes a baptism into a new man in the rising floodwaters. As hero–protagonist Cobb is cast in a new role out of the chaos that Katrina brings; he tries to live a good life to commemorate his cellmate and atone for his sins. Boulet and Cobb are at the centre of a core group of police officers who make up the Felony Action Squad targeting New Orleans's most wanted, struggling courageously with limited resources and contending with post-traumatic stress disorder. Undergoing Hurricane Katrina is likened to suffering as a casualty of war. Cobb is veteran of two years with special operations in Kandahar, Afghanistan, escaping from prison to the army: “With no computer records and all the wars we're fighting, no one asked any questions.” Boulet has witnessed his partner of three years melt down and drive away a few days into the catastrophe. Shooting a dog gnawing on a dead body is the final act that breaks Charlie, and his dereliction of duty sees him cast off the force. Boulet cannot forgive Charlie for “baling” on him and while the two are initially fixed as types – good cop and bad – a narrative arc that involves the theme of guilt and forgiveness is made manifest across the episodes in the lives of different characters. Boulet himself is described as having eyes like a soldier about to break down in a war zone.
Lisco's focus is resilience. With its tagline “Coming back on the bayou,” adapted from a song by Dr. John, K-Ville is a redemptive story of regeneration with the NOPD bound into a narrative of community endurance and personal redemption, as quickly crystallized in the images of community resilience K-Ville celebrates in the title sequence.
On the one hand, the city's regeneration is portrayed as a community venture, with police officers committed and dedicated, bright, ingenious and intuitive as they support this effort. The series does not assume racial antagonism and takes cross-racial marriages and friendships for granted (as with Cobb's black cellmate Sonny and his white wife, whom Cobb foolishly tries to compensate financially for the loss of her husband in episode 4). On the other hand, rebuilding is inextricably bound into market forces, corrupt corporate practices and political grandstanding. This dialectic is central to the series' momentum; it is the balancing act through which such concepts as hope, renewal and survival are negotiated and it combines the sentimental with a more sceptical sense of New Orleans post-Katrina.
Authenticity and veracity are values typically used to judge a post-Katrina story even when it is told in genre fiction. The jacket summary for Tubby Meets Katrina promises readers that this “fast-paced” story will include “incisive vignettes of the dangerous days just after Katrina,” vignettes made possible because author Tony Dunbar “himself had to flee New Orleans to escape the storm, lending authenticity to his personal depictions.” The novel is marketed as both a “thrilling read” and an “important record” – despite the caveat that all books in the series include on the flyleaf: “This novel is a work of fiction … There is no Tubby Dubonnet, and the real New Orleans is different from his make-believe city.” Nevertheless, the familiarity of the wisecracking character who rescues the stranded in his boat until it is commandeered by the NOPD and takes in a raggedy group of survivors struck a chord for local readers and reviewers, as did the depression Tubby suffers. James Lee Burke confided that since he was not actually in the city when Katrina struck, he initially doubted his ability to write about it, but that when he did, in the short story “Jesus Out to Sea,” it was based on the “true story” of a priest who stayed with his parishioners at his church until washed away.Footnote 25 The “based on a true story” byline has been one of the measures used to grade a successful, or indeed acceptable, Hurricane Katrina narrative, including Burke's The Tin Roof Blowdown. One reviewer judges that “all Burke's readers knew a lot about Katrina; it is seared on the consciousness of every American.”Footnote 26 Such global, universalizing assumptions signify another facet of the problem of romancing Katrina by exploring it in the police show format. K-Ville was, I would argue, caught on the horns of a dilemma for critics over the extent to which a popular cultural representation in an established TV genre – especially such a timely dramatization – should also be expected to depict the complexities of the day-to-day recovery, the rich and diverse history of the city and the city's meaning in a larger discourse of US society and politics – and to depict each faithfully and authentically.
K-Ville is revealing in what it tells us about the kind of crime story that sells to audiences as well as to TV critics, and about how difficult it is to find a way to tell a post-Katrina story that will be regarded as sufficient. Blunt yardsticks were constructed as critical tools for its reception. When it first aired, one reviewer noted that it was easy to “root for” K-Ville because “the show's crime plots emerge out of the fury, abandonment, and callous exploitation that rack the city,” with cop heroes working to rein in the chaos, but that the show seemed “less than it could be.” The writers and actors, he charged, “twist and shout to make points” about the desperation and value of a city in recovery.Footnote 27 On the one hand, K-Ville's stories should naturally emerge out of fury and abandonment but, on the other, its characters should neither shout in fury nor preach the value of the city. These are tough guidelines for the action genre to navigate. Another review began by implicitly praising fury-filled action: “The Bush administration would probably rather you skipped K-Ville, Fox's new show about cops trying to bring order back.” It went so far as to argue that “Boulet is to New Orleans what Jack Bauer is to terrorism.”Footnote 28
K-Ville provoked some partisan as well as generic reviewing, with another TV pundit declaring that “K-Ville blows ill for New Orleans” because it is “a disservice to the city it's supposed to help resurrect,” deriding the characterization of the city and Boulet as heroic.Footnote 29 Many reviewers expected an altogether more subtle and slow-burning start to the series of the kind that is rarely advocated for new crime series in other settings or contexts; K-Ville was being held to a set of precepts expected of the realist docudrama – or even documentary – even when the tropes of the genre in which it is couched promised otherwise. A New Orleans-based TV writer and producer, for example, bemoaned what he called “the ‘Barnaby Jones/Columbo’ type of situation depicted in K-Ville's first episode.”Footnote 30 In Lisco's pilot episode one of Boulet's neighbours in the Ninth Ward is murdered as she sings jazz at a benefit to raise money to “Bring Back the Ninth.” Her death turns out to be the by-product of a conspiracy to buy up the land. This immediately creates the impression that the series will tackle controversial issues around racism, redevelopment and corporate corruption. And while that is indeed the case, the plot becomes overelaborate in the way of action-led genre TV drama, using mercenaries, drive-by shootings, shoot-outs and car chases to dramatize a single woman's attempt to make those Ninth Ward residents who suffered but did not die suffer anew.
A white socialite uses her charity to manipulate the Ninth Ward's regeneration; she is twisted by racism, citing her brother's death as motive. Some four years before Katrina, he was robbed, beaten and murdered in the Lower Ninth after stopping to change a tyre. “I didn't do it for the land,” she says,
I did it for my brother. We're supposed to rebuild their neighbourhood. Rebuild their pathetic schools and their crappy homes? Why? So we can bring back all those people who don't value human life? … That storm wasn't a disaster for me or my brother. That storm was a cleansing!
Like the episode of Bones, K-Ville addresses a controversial item in the lexicon of media coverage of Katrina: that of the storm as “cleansing” the city of racial elements. But also, as in Bones, what first presents as an institutional conspiracy turns out to be a personal drama of rage and revenge. In this way K-Ville's opening episode addresses corrupt practices posing as altruistic initiatives of recovery, but also struggles to contain them. Lisco seems fearful of launching into critique and conspiracy and so pulls back, although not so far that the desire to make this cop show hit home fails completely. The Times-Picayune's Chris Rose, in a piece called “K-Ville gets it,” was taken aback: “Only on a fictional TV show can someone utter aloud a despicable sentiment that so many silently hold true.”Footnote 31
Later episodes focus on crimes and mysteries that can only be solved if investigated as post-Katrina crimes. Debates playing out in the press as K-Ville was shooting over 2006 included the racist scapegoating of black New Orleanians and fears that a predominantly white elite was wresting control of decisions about how rebuild the city.Footnote 32 Episode 1 wrestles with the extent to which a police show could incorporate these issues. Boulet's refusal to allow his neighbours to give in to pressure to sell is resonant of resistance to urban renewal projects that would create a new “footprint” for the city by failing to put community first. Boulet's commitment to the Lower Ninth could be compared, for instance, to opinions voiced by Oliver Thomas, president of the city council and a resident of the Ward, when he argued that taking a decision not to fix a community's housing was comparable to failing to honour the dead.Footnote 33 Bloggers cited Anthony Anderson's character Boulet as a positive force through whom the NOPD might be identified, and later he would be nominated for an NAACP Image Award. Chris Rose described Boulet as “our Everyman … the guy who bleeds New Orleans,” and described the conversation Boulet has with wife Ayana about her fear that the city will never feel safe again as a conversation he had overheard many times – “It falls around me like rain, in coffee shops, schoolyards and grocery stores.”Footnote 34 Rose was a fan but also concerned that a cop show format might not facilitate a post-Katrina story. In an open letter to the producers he made a telling remark: “You can make a network prime-time TV series that is groundbreaking, entertaining and meaningful. You can be the next M*A*S*H. But only if you stop trying to be the next Miami Vice.”Footnote 35 A lively and revealing local response to the first episode was circulated when the gumbo parties to which Boulet refers in the pilot spawned a new local tradition. Gumbo parties were thrown to coincide with Monday night K-Ville, with partygoers placing good-humoured bets on which NOLA cliché would be most prevalent in each new episode.Footnote 36 Celebrating gumbo and enjoying K-Ville while debating errors of fact and fantasy would seem to be exactly the kind of balance that most reviewers failed to strike over this cop series.
In the earliest episodes, crime-genre clichés do proliferate. Rousting criminals is posed as a way through the crisis, as if putting the bad guys away equates to bringing back the city. As K-Ville began to establish itself, though, the writers created something of a meta-commentary on television culture, on crime genres and on the national media pursuing a post-Katrina story. In episode 2, the tentacles of corruption become entangled with corporate control when a city clean-up operation is revealed to be a dangerous scam to dump toxic waste, with prison labour exploited by the prison governor for his own financial ends – corruption of the type that news media investigated. By episode 3, Boulet posits the solution to the mystery of how a corrupt politician and a gang leader could be colluding when he realizes they have been sending messages to each other via the prostitute they share. Even Cobb muses, “It's a bit far-fetched to me. Where did you read that – in a crime novel?” Boulet is quick to point out, though, that he read it in a history book, citing John F. Kennedy and Sam Giancana as exemplification. The gang leader they question also observes, “Sounds like the beginning of a good telenovela to me.” In the scene in which Boulet and Cobb meet Matteo Cruz, Boulet accuses him of conspiring so that his non-union Hispanic day labourers “take jobs away from citizens, residents who want to come home and need the work.” Cruz is scathing; he accuses African Americans of waiting for welfare cheques to clear: “You need us to put your roofs on, mow your lawns. We are part of the city now. Hell, we are N'Awlins. If you don't like it, call immigration. But don't hold your breath.” This exchange is an example of how hurriedly the series engaged with complex issues such as new immigrants, fraudulent guest worker programmes, and the need for cheap labour – issues that might have been played out in more sustained ways had K-Ville had time to get key themes embedded throughout a longer series.
Recognizing as cliché what may be staged does become a recurrent theme. In episode 1 Cobb correctly reads the bullet spray at the post-Katrina benefit as an indication that shooters (employed by its socialite figurehead) aimed to miss their targets to create the impression that the charity is under attack. In episode 4 Boulet recognizes that a crime scene is staged because of his knowledge of voodoo. In episode 10 a reporter profiling the NOPD for a New York newspaper “spices up” her story about crime in the city to make her article an exposé while Boulet and Cobb make every attempt to convince her that crimes that beset New Orleans do not simply conform to the stereotypes she seeks in an episode which in this regard recalls the Court TV documentary NOPD: After Katrina (2005), in which officers Jonathan Carroll and Oscar Ortiz patrol the streets responsibly. Unlike Court TV, the K-Ville reporter stages her story because, she tells them, market research reveals that New Orleans is seen as a sideshow by her readers: the “lawless, promiscuous murder capital of the country … that's never coming back.” The officers patiently tell her that despite her readership, “we don't edit our evidence to fit our assumptions – or yours.”
Boulet's deductive reasoning is foregrounded as a plot device, not only because he is the traditional “good cop” but also because he is portrayed as a living archive of New Orleans cultural history. He uncovers a secret code because he learnt to read music as a child playing in a marching band; he cracks open a case because of his knowledge of voodoo, gleaned in youthful pursuit of a girlfriend who espoused the religion. Repeatedly, Boulet exhibits a stoical if almost preternatural sense of what the community needs to rebuild. When his neighbours put their houses up for sale, he refuses to move out and takes it upon himself to pull down the for-sale signs. He is rewarded when the criminal venture to keep African Americans of the Ninth Ward out of the city is exposed and neighbours return home and organize a “house-drying” party for the Boulet family.
When he first spent time in New Orleans researching and planning K-Ville, Lisco described a police officer inviting him to his home, a house that was “barely standing,” where the officer spent each night in a sleeping bag on the floor. The officer's family had moved to Atlanta, but he stayed because of his responsibilities to the city.Footnote 37 Boulet is a version of this man who struck Lisco as the heart of the post-Katrina cop story he wanted to tell. Boulet's wife and child stay in Atlanta during the storm and Ayana is set to leave New Orleans for good, because their daughter cries every time it rains and because “it will never be the same place.” As the episodes progress, evidence of renewal ties her back to New Orleans but the show was withdrawn before that storyline played out.
If reviewer criticism of cop show clichés came thick and fast, complaints that K-Ville only included scenes of the French Quarter seemed reductive when the plots led the cops all over the city – even if as locals pointed out they often seemed to miss driving through entire neighbourhoods to get where they were going. The local economy was, of course, boosted by K-Ville, through the employment of a large local crew and of extras, and while the series sustained local film culture and industries in the short term, pulling the series also pulled that support. Admittedly, K-Ville does not have southern actors – or, more specifically, New Orleanians – in the key roles, and fake southern accents will always hurt a supposedly southern show. Only Elise Neal, who plays Boulet's wife Ayana, is a southerner, from Memphis. Actors Anderson and Hauer are Californians, although Anderson had been acclaimed for his role in Craig Brewer's Memphis-set Hustle and Flow in 2005. Nevertheless, a local fan base does not always prove a key factor in the decision to maintain a new show. It was halted after the Writers Guild of America strike and it would be possible to speculate about the ways in which that strike also bought time for channels to think and act on what already seemed to be the season's successes and failures. But it was probably the time slot that hurt K-Ville most. Bloggers on the New Orleans Heritage and Jazz Festival site and more on Nola.com message boards mourned its passing, but being scheduled against Monday night football was a significant bar to high ratings at the national level and at most 6 million Americans tuned in.
K-Ville may not originally have been conceived as a long-term series like The District or NYPD. Certainly, as executive producer, Lisco described himself as very aware that it would be difficult to dramatize New Orleans in the aftermath of Katrina and discussed the fact that such traumatic events are “safer” to dramatize after they have receded in time.Footnote 38 However, while Lisco was writer on the opening episodes which “explain” the characters and where the risk of erring on the side of cop show clichés is more understandable and more marked, by later shows writers including Wendy West (with stories for Law and Order and The Practice) and directors such as Tucker Gates (veteran of The X-Files, CSI and Lost) were getting into their stride.
K-Ville made a strong suit for acknowledging the responsible role many members of the NOPD played in managing the crisis despite the odds. In this alone it staked its ground to overwrite the impression that officers of the NOPD were falling over each other to leave their posts and escape the city. In the scene in which Boulet forgives his original partner who was traumatized when he turned his back on the chaos for refuge with his family, the writers create some context for what he has since endured:
My shame comes from inside and it's so deep that I can barely look my children in the eyes, especially my oldest son. Living with my decision has been so hard for my family over these past two years that sometimes, as I lie awake at night, I think it might have been better if the storm had washed me away.
In the light of ongoing investigations finding evidence against officers, K-Ville has been rendered more controversial. Five years on, the FBI is still investigating the police department's mistakes, centring on the Danziger Bridge incident of 4 September 2005 in which six black New Orleanians were shot and two died, and the role police played in covering up such shootings. K-Ville was pulled just as it gained confidence in the locale and its storylines began to engage more overtly with the NOPD's role. Mark Lorando, for example, initially sceptical of the show's caricaturing of the city and its problems, was one of the first to lament its loss in the Times-Picayune. By episode 10, scripted by Wendy West and directed by Tucker Gates, Lorando was convinced it had “locked in on the local truth and made it grist”:
Several scenes were artfully composed, and rivaled the best TV dramas for impact and character byplay.
The scene in which Cobb and Boulet investigate leads by rousting street-corner drug dealers while the [New York] reporter watches and surreptitiously photographs the men from inside their unmarked car was a model of TV tension.
As a supporting character, the doomed confidential informer … equaled any of the colorful skels and mopes that once … populated “NYPD Blue.”
The locations were alternately bleak and beautiful and sometimes both.
For a change, the soundtrack contained lots of local music.Footnote 39
In detective fiction that takes New Orleans and Hurricane Katrina as setting and theme, the hurricane is the vortex around which characters swirl, drift and float and are given meaning. In May 2009, David Simon described upcoming HBO-commissioned series Treme as his “allegory for the financial, social and cultural disasters that have shaken the US over the past year.”Footnote 40 Its first episode aired on 11 April 2010 and is inevitably compared to K-Ville. David Simon has shot ten episodes, though he hopes for a similar five-year series like The Wire, the kind of aspiration that Lisco dared not voice. Already feature articles predict success. These are epitomized by Larry Blumenfeld's in the Village Voice, “How Treme can get it right” (its title an echo of Chris Rose's “Why K-ville gets it”). “Fiction though it is,” asserts Blemenfeld, “the stories told here are tethered to the way things really went down.”Footnote 41Treme is a series conceived of by a producer and scripted by a team of writers renowned for high-quality drama precisely in the genre in which K-Ville was couched. Reviewers declare that “as in The Wire, the crime promises to be brutal and unforgivingly portrayed,” although crime may never prove an apt corollary for the tragedy and desperation of Katrina. Already Treme is being hailed as the show that will “undo innumerable mediocre New Orleans-based movies and TV shows that only served gumbo and bad accents with dime-store voodoo mysteries.”Footnote 42Treme is not a cop show and it will not be judged by that genre's lights.
