TV Corner: The Affair

[Content Note: Sexual assault. Spoilers for the TV show The Affair.]

Has anyone been watching Showtime's new series The Affair? Nine of its ten episodes have now aired, and Everyone!^TM is talking about it, and it just got nominated for a bunch of Golden Globs (typo and I'm leaving it), and it is definitely for sure supposed to be one of the best shows ever.

I have watched all nine episodes, and, I have to say, I don't get it.

I don't think it's a terrible show, and I also usually at least understand why other people love shows that I don't care for, but this one is just completely perplexing me. It...just doesn't seem that good or interesting.

Do you love it? I hope somebody loves it, so they can tell me why they love it! I'm genuinely curious!

If you haven't seen it, the premise of the show is that Noah Solloway (played by Dominic West, who cannot do a solid American accent to save his life, so please stop casting him in American roles, please and thank you) is a middle-class teacher and aspiring novelist who is married to Helen (Maura Tierney, one of two reasons I keep watching this show), who is a rich kid whose father is a successful novelist whose favorite pastime is humiliating her husband Noah. Noah and Helen have four spoiled children together, and they summer at her parents' giant mansion in Montauk.

Also: Noah is profoundly unhappy with his life, because he is not rich and famous and has to settle for being happily married with four kids in a lovely Brownstone in New York City. Oh the humanity.

During their summer holiday, Noah meets a waitress named Alison Lockhart (played by Ruth Wilson, the other of two reasons I keep watching this show), who is much younger than he is, and she is married to Cole Lockhart (Joshua Jackson, who is terribly underused here) who has a terrific beard and a less terrific family, who deal drugs to keep their family ranch afloat.

Noah and Alison start having an affair, and Noah totes wants Alison to be his manic pixie dreamgirl, but it turns out she is instead a human being who is sad because her young son died. They fall in love and have lots of sex.

We see the show in two halves every episode: One half from Noah's perspective, and one half from Alison's perspective, and sometimes those perspectives look very different. They are both unreliable narrators. And all of this is wrapped inside a murder mystery, which we follow through flash-forwards to the present (future?), as Noah and Alison are interviewed by a detective about the unsolved death of Alison's brother-in-law, who was hit by a car.

There is a lot going on with these beautiful tragic white people!

Part of the problem with the show, for me, is that I felt disconnected from it the very first episode, after a scene that, from Noah's perspective, looks like Alison being raped by Cole, but, from Alison's perspective, looks like Cole giving her rough sex that she wants (?). I felt like I couldn't trust the show. Which is part of the point, but I was distrusting it in a way that wasn't intended, I think.

And part of the problem is that I hate Noah so much, and his privileged angst, and his obnoxious parenting, which consists of being totally checked out except when he needs to beat someone up to avoid having to acknowledge his daughter's sexual agency.

I'm basically hoping at this point that Helen and Alison are in cahoots to set him up for a murder that someone else committed. GO CRY IN JAIL, NOAH.

And then there's this other thing, which is when a television show or movie represents falling in love by a series of scenes of a woman gazing affectionately and knowingly at a man who has the expression of a naughty scamp. Which irritates me to no end, and this show is SO GUILTY OF IT OMG.






Forever hereafter, I will refer to this as the Did You Fart in a Library Dynamic.

It's just that, you know, for a show whose very title references the affair around which all this drama is centered, they haven't done a super job of convincing me why it is that Noah and Alison have fallen so hard for each other. I mean, Noah just seems like a dipshit who is projecting onto Alison whatever he needs her to be to have the courage to leave his life, and to make sure he's got a scapegoat if and when it turns out to be a bad decision. Alison, on the other hand, seems self-destructive, and wants to be happy with Cole but can't, because inside their relationship lingers such terrible pain. So I get why the affair with Noah, but not why she's "in love" with him.

So, yeah. Those are all the reasons I am not getting this show. But I keep watching it! Because Maura Tierney and Ruth Wilson are pretty great in it! It's not even because I care what happens or whodunnit, because I don't.

Anyway! Are you watching it? Do you love it? Do you hate it? Are you dying to know what happens? Are you so glad to see Mare Winningham again? Does the theme from St. Elmo's Fire play in your head every time you see her? Are you wrapped up in the mystery? Do you love Joshua Jackson's beard SO MUCH and would just watch a television series that was him with that beard riding horses in a button-down shirt all day? TELL ME.