I just binge-watched about twelve chapters of a Showtime
serial called “The Affair.” You might think I’d have an opinion of it but I
don’t. The only thing I’m sure of is which characters I like best. Or like at
all.
Of the chief characters, I most like Helen, Cole, and
Whitney. At least Helen and Cole are the “good,” even if they are tarnished. Whitney?
She’s a teenager run amok, in part derailed by the divorce of her parents, the other part being the expected
traumas of adolescence.
So who’s who and what’s the game? Helen and Noah Sollaway always take the kids
and themselves to spend the summers on Montauk with Helen’s wealthy parents. It’s
an idyllic somewhat boring existence. Noah Solloway takes a walk along the
beach path one day and meets “younger woman” Allison outside her own
cottage. They have a little flirtation
at first, which sends Noah over the moon, and soon they’re wrapped up into a
full-blown affair with lots of stand-up and lay-down screwing, subterfuge,
spousal and family issues, and intense yearnings.
The people who created “The Affair” must be praised for
disobeying the first commandment of Hollywood filmmaking: the leading characters must be appealing.
That is, they must be appealing, even if they are flawed. I wonder though, if
the writers who created the characters of Noah Solloway and Alison Baily intended
them to be weighted toward the disagreeable rather than mostly appealing. Or
perhaps, as happens so many times, it was a case of the inmates overrunning the
asylum.
The show’s creator provides some perspective, and some
additional information about the show, in a conversation she had with TV
Guide.
When I first met Alison, I liked her, not only because she
was the woman who saved the Solloway’s kid from choking to death, but simply
because she was likable. When I first met Noah, my instinct was to withhold
emotional attachment until he showed more of the qualities one appreciates in a
leading man. Instead, the handsome gent
with the deep manly voice showed a great deal of self- absorption, and the type
of self- indulgence that would have allowed him to leave Helen, his wife of
many years and their four children.
My third strike against the Noah Solloway character is that he’s a writer,
struggling along with his first book, then his second, with all the self-doubt
and anxiety that could really produce.
On top of that, he’s competing with his father-in-law, an egomaniacal
man with an established literary reputation. Very often when TV or film writers
want to make a sympathetic character, they make him or her into this struggling
writer meme because…oh, yes… we’re all sacrificing ourselves (not to mention
our families) for Art with a capital “A.” That’s all bullshit, of course; the truth
is far more gritty and unappealing and so many writers have shitty
personalities, outsized egos when compared to the true greats, and worse, they excuse
bad behavior because it is expected of them as eccentric, romantic, literary heros.
Noah Solloway is a guy who can’t say no to himself though he easily and always says no to his wife and four children.
This is not to hand you a lecture on the virtues of “family
values.” It just is what it is. That’s
what happens in “The Affair.” For her part, Allison sullies herself in this
association where she is expected at all turns to accept whatever second-tier
emotional crumbs are left to her. That’s because she is guilt-ridden, having
suffered through the death of her young child, sending her marriage to Cole
spiraling downward. The script leaves no
secret that Alison is a masochist – she even cuts herself on the upper thigh so
that she can feel the pain of loss again and again. If you don’t believe that, consider the
suicide scene where she tries to walk out into the ocean to drown.
“The Affair” puts the audience in a moral space, of course, and
even seems persuasive of the view that affairs are a good thing. It’s possible they may be a good thing in
some twisted sense but they hurt people. The Noah Solloway character,
intelligent, bright, handsome, and driven, is for me very hard to like.
Yet, I have wallowed in the sexy misery of twelve episodes,
and now that I’m caught up, will find it easier to follow until it either ends
or gets entirely boring (It does have boring segments where you can turn back
to Twitter or other social media while watching it without missing much).
I’ve made some criticisms, and I don’t think they’re
particularly harsh. I hope they’re not harsh because the actors are not to be
faulted for the script and the story line.
I would say that it is because
of the talent of the actors that made me catch the unlikable imperfect shading
with which the characters are imbued. If
that’s a convoluted sentence or way of putting it, let me say it this way: the acting in the series has been
consistently above par.
Which brings me to the right-on acting of the snotty teen
girl, Noah and Helen’s snarky and malevolent seventeen year old daughter
Whitney, who gets knocked up by one of Alison’s brothers-in-law. But that will wait for another time.
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