Treme Season 4 Episode 1 sometimes in unexpected ways. Albert (Clarke Peters) is dealing with his cancer. Antoine (Wendell Pierce) is still trying to mentor kids as a music teacher, while Terry (David Morse) continues to push back against the police bureaucracy. And so on.

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Yet even with the occasional ray of hope, Simon’s general outlook is too bleak to provide much consolation, either for his characters or for the show’s small but loyal audience.

Having watched all of “Treme,” it’s possible to admire the vision — and the performances by Alexander, Pierce, Peters, Morse, Kim Dickens, and Lucia Micarelli, among others — without feeling like the enterprise was a success.

Admittedly, part of that has to do, personally speaking, with modest appreciation of New Orleans jazz — or for that matter, the intricacies of creole cooking — that left the extended and abundant performance sequences feeling frequently like they brought the story to a halt. Ditto for stiff cameos by renowned musicians and chefs, generally demonstrating that not everyone is cut out to act.

Simon set the creative bar extraordinarily high for himself with “The Wire” and “Generation Kill,” and HBO has provided him and his collaborators the latitude to continue to do so.

Occasionally beautiful and emotional, but also bleak and frustrating, “Treme” certainly hasn’t sullied that reputation. Yet despite the writer’s contention that it’s his best show, for all but those few who savored every note, this rumination on a beleaguered The Big Easy doesn’t belong in the august company of those earlier gems.

wendell-pierce-treme-final-season.jpgThe final season of "Treme" starts on an up note for the residents of New Orleans, but as with the entire story to date, not everything will be easy.

HBO has released a teaser for the abbreviated, five-episode season, which premieres at 9 p.m. ET Dec. 1. The show picks up on election night in 2008, three-plus years after Hurricane Katrina. Barack Obama's election has the city hopeful that more attention will be paid to the post-Katrina rebuilding effort, but problems ranging from corrupt police to greedy developers.

Wendell Pierce, Khandi Alexander, Clarke Peters, Steve Zahn, Melissa Leo, Kim Dickens and the rest of the regular cast returns for Season 4, which will conclude with the series finale on Dec. 29. Take a look at the trailer:

HBO has released the key art (see below) for the upcoming fourth and final season of their drama series Treme , which is set to premiere on Sunday December 1st at 9/8c.

Created by David Simon, Treme explores a unique American culture rebuilding after historic devastation, chronicling the life of New Orleans residents in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. The drama series stars Wendell Pierce, Khandi Alexander, Clarke Peters, Rob Brown,Steve Zahn, Kim Dickens, Melissa Leo, Michiel Huisman, Lucia Micarelli, Jon Seda, David Morse and India Ennenga. The show’s fourth season is set between November 2008 and Mardi Gras 2009, 38 months after Hurricane Katrina. Barack Obama has just been elected to the White House, giving this battered, majority-black city reason for optimism. Yet for every entrenched resident who hopes to improve his or her lot – or just return to a sense of pre-Katrina normalcy – others are intent on capitalizing on the city’s vulnerability and suffocating its culture.

HBO’s “Treme” was an unlikely proposition from the start. It was predicated on a natural disaster, Hurricane Katrina, that happened five years before the show started, and that lag has always been awkward. The meticulous re-creation of not quite recent outrages — perpetrated by politicians no longer in office and cops already indicted — has made the show seem to be in a weird time warp all its own.