The Affair

“The overwhelming majority of The Affair’s episodes are directed by men, making it difficult to push beyond the male gaze.”

Title: The Affair
Episodes Reviewed: Entire series (Seasons 1-5)
Creators: Hagai Levi 👨🏼🇮🇱 and Sarah Treem 👩🏼🇺🇸
Writers: Sarah Treem 👩🏼🇺🇸 (12 eps), Sharr White 👨🏼🇺🇸 (5 eps), Anya Epstein 👩🏼🇺🇸 (4 eps), Sarah Sutherland 👩🏼🇺🇸 (4 eps), and various

Reviewed by Dana 👩🏼🇺🇸♿

—SPOILERS AHEAD—

Technical: 4.5/5

Created by Hagai Levi and Sarah Treem, The Affair refocuses the classic small-town noir on very small and very messed up Montauk. An iconic beach town perched on the Easternmost tip of Long Island, Montauk has long been the go-to summer destination for the New York City elite.

The series begins with Helen and Noah Solloway (Maura Tierney and Dominic West), their minivan full of kids in tow, arriving at the mini-mansion of Helen’s parents to do just that. Almost immediately, the wheels come off their seemingly perfect marriage as Noah finds himself drawn to Montauk native Alison (Ruth Wilson), herself married to Cole (a brooding, scruffy, post-Dawson’s Creek Joshua Jackson). Split into segments from the perspectives of different characters, episodes unfold in a Rashomon-style game of unreliable narrators, giving viewers a glimpse into how differently Noah and Alison (and later, Helen, Cole, and a handful of other characters) view their overlapping stories.

The four main protagonists, whose lives quickly become entangled, interact like atoms in the world’s most melancholy nuclear reactor. Their proximity becomes dangerous in any combination, and even when they’re removed from Montauk—the core of their trauma-powering machine—they leave behind trails of radioactive angst whose destructive effects aren’t yet known. The Affair isn’t really a show about two people cheating on their spouses, but about the fallout: the insidious cancer that spreads throughout families and across generations when historic trauma isn’t confronted and toxic behavior isn’t called out.

Until the fifth and final season, it appeared as though the show would be a sort of disaster story akin to Chernobyl, a story of sheer destruction that never gets a real resolution. But showrunner Sarah Treem manages to find a way—despite the departure of Ruth Wilson and Joshua Jackson at the end of Season 4—to force some reckoning by framing it in two timely issues: the #MeToo movement and the growing threat of climate change. As the terminal episodes play out, split between present-day California ablaze with wildfires and future-Montauk waiting be be washed into the sea, things begin to come into focus.

The forces of nature pushing back against a sustained assault by humans stands as a metaphor for the pain inflicted upon the women of The Affair, who have been objectified, taken for granted, and betrayed over and over. The final season lays bare the repercussions of both, and while it takes awhile to become obvious (and has some less successful moments), the result is an explosion of rage befitting a show that has spent five years giving characters—and viewers—some very good reasons to be mad.

Gender: 4.25/5
Does it pass the Bechdel Test? It depends on who’s telling the story. Female perspectives usually pass, while male perspectives usually fail.

While its farewell season offers a look at the constructs and consequences of male power, for the most part, The Affair’s women conform to the same set of strictures as so many of modern television’s pseudo-empowered female characters. In particular, they adhere to the archetype built to suit “prestige” television—premium cable shows unrestricted by network censors or broad demographics—in which female agency is expressed most emphatically through sex. That’s not to suggest that sex, even explicit sex, is a bad thing, or that it cannot be used to express female autonomy and power. But the first season spends so much time on barely-focused shots of a breathy, topless Alison that it’s difficult to disagree with Noah’s later description: that “she was sex.”

The overwhelming majority of The Affair’s episodes—and therefore, its sex scenes—are directed by men, making it difficult, if not impossible, to push beyond the parameters of the male gaze. The camerawork isn’t voyeuristic, exactly, but constantly trends towards the idea that Alison’s beauty and sexuality can be captured and displayed as art. Rather than a validation of female sexual desire, it serves to paint Alison as the siren as which Noah sees her—even when the story is being told from her point of view. It comes as a disappointment that the show doesn’t use its split-perspective setup to delve into a more meta exploration of storytelling: a literal refocusing, pairing female perspectives with female directors and male perspectives with male directors. Instead, we’re left with a more contrived set of switch-ups that, no matter how good the writing is, never feels entirely natural.

Noah, whose entitled dickishness Dominic West plays spectacularly well and which blazes a path of destruction through the series serves as a proxy for all the issues raised by the #MeToo movement that don’t have clear-cut answers. It’s unsurprising, and unsatisfying, when his behavior finally catches up to him, mostly because the two women most affected by his actions never get a real opportunity to confront him.

Which brings us to Helen, and here, I must stop and make an impassioned plea: Somebody give Maura Tierney an Emmy, because the woman has perfected the fine art of looking completely fucking destroyed. And, thanks in large part to Noah, Helen is. Repeatedly. She gets justifiably angry, and a wrathful, expletive-spitting Maura Tierney stands as only slightly less of a masterpiece than the aforementioned portrait of angst. Helen’s rage is visceral and relatable and so very of-the-moment, because haven’t we all been screwed over before by a man like Noah? Repeatedly, and with a stunning lack of self-awareness from our emotional assailant?

Maybe that relatability is why it comes as such a letdown that, even though she gets something approximating a happy ending, Helen never gets to fully address the myriad ways in which Noah has hurt her. Her anger comes in fits and bursts, or finds articulation during rare moments of civil discourse with Noah. But even when his past predatory behaviors come back to bite him, Noah is never forced to confront the fact that he raped his ex-wife. Whatever redemption he manages in the final episodes through wise words and heartfelt apologies and declarations of love, it’s impossible to let go of that, or of the profound disappointment in the way it was—or rather wasn’t—handled.

Race: 3.5/5

The Affair starts off as starkly, stubbornly white, and the framing of the plot around four characters at peak caucacity makes it difficult to change that. With being so very white comes an inevitable display of privilege, sometimes acknowledged and sometimes—most times—not. Noah and Helen present as stock images of Gen-X Brooklynites with their brownstone bankrolled by her parents, while she runs a boutique full of overpriced decor that nobody actually needs. Despite the ever-increasing tension over race and class in New York City’s schools, public school teacher Noah appears insulated from the turmoil: The apparent dissatisfaction with his life falls into the category of #WhitePeopleProblems. The freedom afforded by his privilege allows him the space to wallow in self-pity that he hasn’t achieved whatever exultation he believes he deserves.

Commendably, The Affair seems to recognize its failings by the third season, and uses the frayed relationships that have left the central foursome single to introduce new characters, most of them people of color. Helen, after being cast aside by Noah and embarking on a doomed fling with his former best friend, begins a relationship with stomach surgeon Vik (Omar Metwally), which evolves into one of the more stable, healthy relationships of the series (until things inevitably fall apart, because this is a show about people with a life-threatening allergy to happiness).

The fifth season gives us more of a glimpse into Vik’s backstory, introducing his parents, who come across—at least in Helen’s perspective—as traditional, somewhat conservative Indian immigrants. Priya (Zenobia Shroff), Vik’s mother, drops by Vik and Helen’s house unannounced to stock the fridge with homemade naan and chana masala and to tailor her son’s pants, generally playing the role of overbearing, disapproving immigrant parent. As Vik becomes ill and eventually dies of cancer, Priya does become more sympathetic, and Vik’s solitary turn as narrator allows viewers to see his parents from a non-white perspective. Still, the nagging question of why Metwally, who is Egyptian on his father’s side, plays an Indian man brings to mind the problematic nature of casting Indian, Arab, and other brown ethnicities as interchangeable. Rarely is anything lost by allowing an actor to play their own ethnicity, particularly when there are few or no people of color writing their lines.

Meanwhile, in Montauk, Cole’s new wife Luisa (Catalina Sandino Moreno) gets a timely, if inconsistently executed, storyline about immigration: We learn early on that she is undocumented, and during some raw moments she describes the constant, stifling fear that hangs over her. Luisa, by far, is the show’s best-developed secondary character, partly because Moreno brings the same ability to embody turmoil and pain as do the core quartet. At moments, she veers towards an antagonist foil for Alison, but it’s made clear how much she cares for Cole and Alison’s daughter, Joanie (Anna Paquin). A brief return in Season 5 also offers a small coda to Luisa’s story: We’re reassured that she has continued to play a major role in Joanie’s life.

Where Vik and Luisa never rise to the level of importance as the four primary characters, their inclusion in the story feels organic. The same, unfortunately, can’t be said for Janelle (Sana’a Lathan), the principal of Compton Academy where Noah begins teaching in the fourth season. Despite the self-aware and self-deprecating references to insipid white savior narratives like Freedom Writers (2007) and Dangerous Minds (1995), the arc still feels exploitative coming from a mostly-white writers’ room on a show about white people. The story itself—Janelle is frustrated at the way the school board constantly seeks to undermine and minimize her—unfolds too distantly from the rest of the series to escape feeling like a bid to boost the show’s #woke creds. It’s especially disappointing in light of how much potential Janelle’s story does have, and how well Lathan plays her repressed anger.

LGBTQ: 2.5/5

Helen and Noah’s son, Trevor (Jadon Sand), comes out in the fourth season and his blossoming relationship with Brooklyn (Clay Hollander) flies in the face of his family legacy of dysfunction. Their teenage romance is refreshingly wholesome given the interpersonal cluster surrounding them, and The Affair updates the usual coming-out script a bit by focusing on the reaction of Trevor’s parents to his sexuality before he’s officially come out. Though it falls into the common trend of centering a coming out story on the reactions of the people around a queer character, the story at least deviates from tired norms and plays with the concerns of parents who are supportive, if impatient.

An episode in Season 5 sees Trevor dressed as Rocky Horror icon Frank-N-Furter for Halloween, which doesn’t faze his parents but does elicit an exasperated response from his image-conscious, insufferable grandmother (Kathleen Chalfant). While the show overall is largely devoid of other queer representation, it does deserve some credit for presenting a positive, affirming image of a young person embracing their sexual identity.

Mediaversity Grade: B- 3.69/5

For all the metaphors that could describe the sordid, self-sabotaging, screwed-up lives of The Affair’s central characters, the one constant has always been water: The ripple effects of their decisions touch the characters first in Montauk and later with the endless blue of the Pacific as a backdrop. Fiona Apple’s theme feels eerily fitting with its refrain of “sink back into the ocean,” and the gravitational push and pull between moon and tides makes the cover of “The Whole of the Moon,” which she performs as an endcap to the series, utterly superb. The characters are caught in an undertow of their own making—one that threatens to pull them and everyone around them under.

At moments, The Affair stuns with evocative dialogue, gorgeous camerawork, haunting themes, and a stellar cast. At others, white privilege runs amok and wallows interminably in messes of its own making, while stubbornly indifferent to the real misery and trauma occurring outside its bubble.

I’ve watched since the beginning, and I still don’t know if I love or hate this show. I still don’t know if it's a brilliant deconstruction of relationships or a vainglorious drama about four terrible people making terrible choices and being terrible to one another. That’s really the central mystery, and of prestige TV in general: Is it truly high art, or just something packaged and sold as better than the rest? Do the literary and artistic references serve as context clues, or are they just a wink to viewers who know that they’re part of some higher echelon of taste and intellect than the mass-market hoi polloi? Is there something profound here, or is The Affair just an exercise in Sorkinesque self-importance?

That—oh so fittingly—depends on who you ask.

Like The Affair? Try these other small-town TV dramas.

Grade: BLiNovember 25, 2019Female/Nonbinary Creator