Previewing The Affair: Season Two

There has been a trend recently to give each new season a new subtitle. The first time I remember this happening was with Spartacus which officially changed its title every year. Some network do it to re-brand shows like Gotham: Rise of the Villains. Others are just unofficial cheat attempt at social marketing (#BlackSwan). The new season of The Affair might as well have a new name because the titular affair is now out in the open they might as well call the new season The Affair: The Divorce.

The first season of The Affair was maybe the weirdest non-sci-fi series in the history of television though I am not sure if that is a good thing or not. Really my best recollection of the first season was when Bill Simmons (formally of The BS Report and soon to be host of The Bill Simmons Podcast) who countered a dissenter of The Affair saying "you are watching the wrong way." But even as the first season ended, I still was not sure I was watching the show the right way.

At its core, The Affair is an interesting concept with two different points of view which sometime slightly very and other times are completely different. Who is right and who is wrong? We may never now. And to make things more interesting or complicated depending on how you watch the show, the episodes ended sometime in the future with the police investigating a murder. It at first seemed like the two stories were being told to the police but that no longer seems like the case. The ended of the season ended with us learning that Noah and Alison were married with a child just before he was hauled away by the police in the murder of her former brother-in-law, the very one who knocked up his teenage daughter in present day and did not even bother to show up for the abortion.

If you did not like the duel storytelling of the first season, I got some really bad news for you (mild spoiler alert but the premiere is already online and On Demand if you want to watch it, and you may want to watch the TV-14 version on YouTube because the TVMA version features full frontal male nudity) because not only do we get the stories of Noah and Alison, the twist of the new season is after Noah's story, the second story is not Alison but of Helen, Noah's soon to be ex-wife. Like last season, they have slightly different versions of their run in with each other: he thinks their mediator is a overzealous douchebag and she sees him as a slimy douchebag.

And as you guessed it, the second episode starts off with Alison before we get Cole's point of view. So if this holds up, we may only get six days told four ways instead of two stories told twelve ways. But unlike Noah and Helen's slight difference, Alison and Cole's sole run in next week diverges quite differently. Who is telling the truth? I am beginning to think no one is and maybe the only thing we can believe as fact is the future scenes where we finally get to see future Helen and Cole for the first time.

I started to believe that none of the storytellers were being truthful in the first season because each person made themselves look better than they probably were. Noah viewed himself as the stoic superdad seduced by a temptress while Alison viewed herself as the grieving mother who finally gave into the advances of a cad. But this season, all four storytellers portray themselves as pretty horrible people. And they are all clearly kind of horrible people. So maybe this is the season where all the characters realize just how horrible they are and can finally admit it. But who they are admitting it to, nobody knows.

The Affair airs Sundays at 10:00 on Showtime.