What “The Affair” Can Teach Us About Arc Mysteries

Adultery Doesn’t Look Like Much Fun, Actually

A lot of TV shows hit the small screen with noise and thunder, inspiring think pieces and heated discussion. Few series maintain that level of fascination. For every Game of Thrones there’s The Affair, a show that debuted to a lot of harrumphing about its central storytelling device (conflicting POVs) but has settled into a groove of “premiere television.” Who knows how many people are actually watching this show, and while it still gets mentioned here and there it’s certainly not a cultural obsession.

I enjoy it, although I’ll admit the central device — those conflicting POVs — is irritatingly mishandled, at least in my not-so-humble opinion. Maybe there’s a brilliant long game there, but after two seasons my main takeaway from the POVs is that they are often so wildly inconsistent the characters must be insane people. Unreliable narrators is a great idea: Looking for clues to the truth in two different versions of the same story is potentially powerful. And the show sometimes attains that greatness in little moments; for example, the male protagonist Noah (played, brilliantly as always, by Dominic West) remembers himself consistently as an asshole, which is a really wonderful note to strike, considering the character is clearly selfish, self-involved, and going through a real doozy of a midlife crisis. That sort of detail in an unreliable narrator — plus the fact that he actually often comes off a bit better in other people’s POV — is a great use of the device.

Unfortunately, frequently the recollections of the same scene from different people are so different it’s literally impossible. No one knows better than my wife and I how two people can remember a moment differently, but not to the extent of warping time and space the way The Affair does. It takes a powerful device and renders it ridiculous and irritating.

But! I have not come here to bury The Affair or to praise its misused conceit. I have come to discuss how brilliantly it’s using its central season-spanning mystery.

The Potboiler

Initially, the show is all soap opera: A frustrated father (Noah) of four takes his family on a vacation to Long Island. Feeling like a professional failure and outsider with his wife’s rich family, he starts a passionate affair with a troubled local waitress (Alison). The conflicting unreliable POVs are used to some good effect as the two recall the beginning of the affair differently. Spoilers to follow if you have not watched the show but plan to someday.

There are also flash-forwards to future events that the show’s timeline is slowly catching up to, a future in which Noah is divorced from his ex-wife Helen, and has a child with Alison, in which Noah has published a successful novel which is basically a thinly-veiled account of his affair with Alison, in which Alison’s former brother-in-law has been killed in a hit and run, and in which Noah is the main suspect in that crime. The details of this soapy set up can get a bit convoluted, so let’s just boil it down to the fact that the second season of the show has been leading to the reveal of what actually happened when the brother-in-law was killed. And here’s where the show, which has mutated now from a relationship drama with a borrowed literary device (that did more for the show’s pretension level than its effectiveness) into a show about a murder mystery, did something very smart. It set up a scenario where all three of the main characters — Helen, Noah, and Alison — are involved and complicit in the killing.

The show’s been very patient in setting up the threads it brought together in the Season Two finale, planting seeds for the characters so their decisions leading up to the accident make sense, and their mutual decisions to cover it up make sense. The end result is exactly what an arc-mystery is supposed to do when it’s clarified: It complicates things and provides fresh motivations for the characters. The show is now completely transformed, it’s no longer about an affair and its repercussions, it’s about one boozy night and a dead man and the fallout from the decisions made in the wake of that. The fact that all of these threads spin out from the show’s original premise — the titular affair — makes it feel very organic.

So Often Wrong

The problem with most arc-mysteries is twofold: One, they don’t actually have any resolution, the writers are just making things up as they go. and two, they often resolve in ways that are designed to leave the basic DNA of the story undisturbed. A show like Lost will always be remembered more for the frankly awful way the central mystery of the story was resolved than for the glories of its storytelling. And too many shows have offered up solutions to arc-mysteries that try to simultaneously be shocking while allowing the writers to go back to business as usual in the next episode. Arc Mysteries are easy ways of generating buzz and getting people hooked on a show as they collect clues and exchange theories, but they’re also constricting if there’s no plan. It sure is easy to write a scene where something mysterious and mind-blowing happens. It’s much more difficult to come up with a clear explanation for it later.

The Affair did it right. Whether or not they capitalize on that in future seasons remains to be seen, of course.