When it comes to television, I live on the sort of time-lag familiar to anyone with Tivo or a DVR. About the only live TV I’ve seen in the last month has been the World Cup games, as painful as the US and UK defeats have been to witness in real time. All my favorite shows linger in limbo until I’m ready.

So I was caught a little off-guard by the conclusion of HBO’s Treme. Like most of the show’s fans, I had been won over by the lacksadaisical pace and ensemble acting. Where David Simon’s previous series, The Wire, had been all land mines and barbed wire in terms of the dangers that befell its huge cast of characters, Treme has been mostly soft landings.

“I keep waiting for a plot to kick in,” a friend of mine grumbled just a few weeks ago. Though the racial tensions of New Orleans have been evident, the real webbing of this series is music and, to a lesser extent, food. Two of my favorite pastimes, and neither particularly fraught with danger.

So [spoiler alert for those waiting to watch the first season! turn back now!] the suicide of John Goodman’s increasingly depressed English professor, Creighton Burnett, sort of knocked me for a loop. It’s a tough topic for me, in general: my father (an English teacher by trade btw) killed himself in his eighties, and I think the subject is often used in a cheap and unconvincing fashion in TV dramas. When in doubt, have someone kill themselves.

But the death of Goodman’s professor seemed earned, as they say in the acting business, and a longtime coming. It wasn’t just the angry tirades against Bush and FEMA that he put on YouTube (anger being the flipside of depression) or the empty screen he confronted when trying to finish his novel (writer’s block being another metaphor for the futility of existence); it was his whole sagging, deflated demeanor as the forced happiness of life in the Big Easy got harder to maintain.

And yeah, I lost it watching his wife and kid (the amazing Melissa Leo and child actress India Ennenga) deal with his death. Before they knew where he’d gone (for one last swim in the Mississippi) the daughter asks mom, “What’s a dependent clause?”

“O don’t ask me!” says Leo’s Toni Bernette (whose character owes more than a little to real NOLA attorney and advocate Mary Howell). “That’s your father’s department.”

Interdependence might turn out to be the true theme of this surprisingly emotionally rewarding drama.