Noah Solloway (Dominic West) is a happily married to Helen (Maura Tierney), they have four children and he’s a NYC teacher whose life about to change on a summer family trip to his father-in-law’s in Montauk, NY. Tonight at 10p on Showtime he begins The Affair with Alison Lockhart (Ruth Wilson) whose married to Cole Lockhart (Joshua Jackson) and they recently lost a kid.
For the first half hour, we will hear Noah’s story on how he met his mistress. Then for the second part of the show we find out how Alison remembers it. They each tell their tales to a cop. Why they are there we will find out soon, but what happened will come later so we will have to tune in ever week to find out.
A few weeks ago at the Showtime TCA Summer Press Tour Day Sarah Treem explained why the series is told as a he said/she said.
Oh, it doesn’t matter to me. I don’t think it lessens the experience to know going in. I mean, we’re really interested in telling a story in a kind of Rashmomon structure, because I think storytelling in general is driven by perspective, and there are two sides at least, to every story. And so we wanted to tell a story that was going to kind of capitalize on a different perspective, and so we were thinking about how to structure a story like that, and we thought a love affair would be the way to do it. And then, and an affair seemed to be kind of like a love affair on steroids. So when you’re having an affair, you’re you know, you’re never privy to what your lover is thinking, even if you’re married to them. But when you’re having an affair, you don’t even have access to what your lover is experiencing when you’re not around. There’s this whole other world that they inhabit that you never get to see. So for the characters, that felt like kind of the richest situation to put them in if we really wanted to tell a story from two perspectives and really kind of play around to like how differently people can experience the same situation.
Adding – There will be a point in the series where you start to see another perspective, and you could perhaps assume that that perspective was the absolute truth, but I think that perspective will turn out to be unreliable as well. I mean, I don’t think about it so much as unreliability. I just think about it as perspective. There will be times where their perspectives match much more closely as we go farther than they’re lining up right now, because they’re going back to basically the beginning now. The way I sort of thought about it is sort of an epic storytelling structure where we start in the middle and then we go back to the beginning and then we push through all the way to the end. So we’ll get closer basically to the paths will crash into the present at one point.
