Eric Overmyer wrote television that declined to hurry. With David Simon he built dramas out of neighbourhoods rather than cases and let the talk and the music run their full length. We rate the results highly, with one warning about patience.
Fi1m perspective
Somewhere in most episodes of Treme, a band starts a number and the programme stays until the last note. Nobody is shot to bring us back to the story, because there is very little story to come back to. Three months after the flood, a dozen people in one New Orleans neighbourhood try to do what they did before, badly and without money, and the series asks whether that counts as rebuilding. It is the clearest example of how Eric Overmyer wrote: give the audience a place and some people, and do not rescue them with a plot.
He came to television from the stage, which is where the talk came from. He began in the mid-1980s on St. Elsewhere (1982), a hospital drama we like for its flawed staff even when the scripts insist on a lesson we had already taken. From 1996 he wrote and produced Homicide: Life on the Street, the police series that made its detectives as absorbing as their cases, and it was there he first worked with David Simon. He wrote on the fourth series of The Wire in 2006. Then came Treme (2010–2013), which he made with Simon and drew from his own years in the city, and after it Bosch (2014–2021), which he created from Michael Connelly's novels and ran for seven seasons, along with a stint on Boardwalk Empire and the third series of The Man in the High Castle.
What he did well was regional speech and the daily workings of institutions that do not work: a homicide squad, a flooded parish, a police department in Baltimore. What he did not do was hurry, and that is the caveat. Treme asks more patience than most drama, and there is at least one character in it we would happily have done without. The first time a song ran its full length without a cut away, we were restless. By the third we had stopped wanting the cut, because it had become plain that the music was what these people were actually rebuilding. That is the moment the series won us, and it took the better part of an episode to get there.
It is hard to say where a staff writer's work ends and the other writers' begins, and on The Wire and Homicide we would not try. Nobody has had much bad to say about Overmyer; the nearest thing to a reservation is that his plays never travelled as far as his television did. That is a critic's note, not a viewer's. Start with Treme, and give it three episodes. If by then you are checking the clock, Homicide is the way in, and it will not make you wait for the plot.
Biography
Eric Overmyer, also credited as Eric Ellis Overmyer, was an American writer and producer for television. He studied theatre at Reed College and began his career as a playwright before moving into television writing in the mid-1980s.
Overmyer wrote for series including St. Elsewhere, Homicide: Life on the Street and Law & Order. He joined the crew of The Wire as a writer and consulting producer for the fourth season in 2006, later serving as producer, and shared a Writers Guild of America Award for Outstanding Dramatic Series and an Edgar Award for the season’s writing. He co-created Treme with David Simon and created the series Bosch.
