If my grandchildren ask me what I was doing when I heard Osama bin Laden had been killed — something the talking heads of CNN kept insisting they would as they tried to fill the dead air before the president’s formal announcement last night — I will have to say, “Watching Treme on HBO.”

The second show of the second season had already been interrupted — about 2o minutes in the network began to broadcast what looked like a dressing room scene from the Lady Gaga special, or maybe it was a Time-Warner glitch — and I was worrying that the show was losing the thread a bit already. By and large I love the series the way I love New Orleans itself, with a somewhat blind eye to its shortcomings (sentimentality being the most glaring) and a finger-popping enthusiasm for the music and the food.

And the food stuff got a big kick in the pants this season when Anthony Bourdain was hired to write the subplot of Kim Dickens’s chef as she endures an exile in New York under the iron toque of a Nazi chef (played by Victor Slezak) who says things like “Listen to your fish.”

But then our daughter came downstairs to say that someone had just tweeted something about bin Laden’s death, and we changed channels to watch the slow build-up to Obama’s address to the nation. In its aftermath questions are arising — how come the Pakistani’s didn’t know that he was living so close to one of their military bases? and how come the US buried him at sea when someone should have known the Arab world would want to see the body (have you ever seen one of those terrorist funerals, where the crowd tries to tip the casket over to kiss the dead guy’s garments?)? But for a moment there at least one of the longer running stories in the US news seemed to have a satisfactory conclusion.

I never got back to see the end of last night’s episode of Treme. I’d ask you not to ruin anything for me but at this pace, it will be months before anyone else dies. Though there are a few dark clouds on the horizon and if I was a female fiddle player I’d be watching my back.