Much like Janette, Treme takes pride in not pandering to its audience. Its numerous storylines rarely intersect in a dramatically resonant way, even as they maintain a nodding familiarity with one another—and even the more conventional narrative setups of the show (such as an investigation into an suspicious death) stretch across multiple seasons without being resolved. Characters celebrate and deconstruct music at length, and erstwhile plot points sit idle while performers talk about their songs, play their songs, and introduce each other during instrumental breaks in the middle of their songs. Dialogue drifts into unexplained subcultural insider-speak ("Ronnie gonna run flag; I'm gonna run spy"), and characters unironically announce things like "unlike some plot-driven entertainments there is no closure in real life."

No doubt this self-conscious defiance of TV norms is part of the point of Treme (a reflection, perhaps, of its city's unconcerned pace of life) but this rarely proves evocative so much as tedious. All too often, the show has the feel of something that has been designed to be to be admired rather than enjoyed—and, like a leather-bound set of Great Books, it has a way of advertising its own importance without actually offering anything new. At times it comes off less like a character drama than an avant-garde adaptation of Wikipedia's "List of Musicians from New Orleans," serving to remind viewers that their lives are less than complete if they’ve missed out on the musical stylings of Germaine Bazzle, or Earl Turbinton, or Frogman Henry, or Trombone Shorty, or Mr. Google Eyes.

The more the show catalogues the details of New Orleans at the microscopic level, however, the more the city's obvious particularities feel absent. A prime example of this is the city's much-loved football team, the Saints, which is never mentioned by name in the show's first season. In Treme's ethos, mass-culture entertainments are by nature vulgar and inauthentic, and one senses the show's creators may have been hesitant to have characters discuss the National Football League when they could instead be rhapsodizing about sweet potato Andouille shrimp soup, or marveling at an Allen Toussaint performance. The show corrects course on the Saints in its second season (supposedly in tandem with the team's 2006 season, though more likely because these episodes were filmed in the wake of the team's historic 2010 Super Bowl victory), but by then other narrative anomalies have begun to stand out. When Delmond Lambreaux's friend encourages him to use social media to promote his jazz career, for instance, Facebook is mentioned before MySpace—an odd detail, since by late 2006 MySpace was synonymous with music promotion, whereas Facebook had only been accessible to the general public for a couple of months. One suspects this detail wasn't pegged to its 2006 setting so much as its 2011 airdate (by which time MySpace had become passé). The Facebook reference was likely tacked on because viewers not attuned to the year might be tempted to think the show's characters were out of touch—and in Treme's obscurist, hyper-specific cultural universe, the viewers are the ones who are supposed to be out of touch.