The Affair: Season 1 (2014)

A collaboration between Hagai Levi and Sarah Treem, his co-writer on In Treatment, The Affair is about the relationship between a married man, Noah Solloway (Dominic West) and a married woman, Alison Lockhart (Ruth Wilson). Noah is a high school teacher who’s trying to write his second novel while on holiday with his wife (Maura Tierney) at her parents’ mansion in Montauk, where he meets Alison, a retired nurse who’s working as a waitress at a local diner. Both of them are driven to the affair by their own frustrations – Noah hates being dependent on his wealthy father-in-law, a bestselling novelist (played by John Doman, in a nod to Wire fans), while Alison and her husband (Joshua Jackson) are trying to recover from the death of their four-year old son – with the result that each episode is divided into two sections, one detailing Noah’s version of events, and one detailing Alison’s version of events, a divergence which start to take on a forensic significance as a police investigation emerges around the fringes of their recollections. To some extent, the differences between these “male” and “female” versions of the story are fairly forgettable, but they’re sustained by Noah and Alison’s very different apprehensions of Montauk itself – specifically, Noah’s impressions as a tourist, and Alison’s impressions as a local, a member of the service sector. In fact, it’s only through their affair that the town’s legendary atmosphere emerges, since Levi takes care to continually to position their courtship in the contested zone between locals and tourists, haves and have-nots, drawing on the same luminous sense of presence and place that he brought to In Treatment. If Alison is trying to escape Montauk through Noah, then Noah is just as keen to escape to Montauk through Alison, as their affair gathers all the momentum of a town that seems to have set out to market and monopolise atmosphere like nowhere else in the United States. As a kind of flagship for the “Montauk experience,” Alison and Noah become more and more attuned to the emergent atmosphere between them, more and more anxious to calibrate and cultivate it with each new development in their romance, until it feels as if Montauk has really lived up to its nickname of “The End,” oblivious to the continent stretching back behind its insular, fetishistic fixation with its own sense of place. Recent shortform American television has been fixated with exactly this kind of regionalist texture, which Levi's Montauk Project takes to an extreme – it really feels like a single-season show, even though it’s been renewed - looping its looming awareness of The End back into an ever more splendidly isolated sense of its own atmospheric utterances, as if the town itself were in treatment, disclosing its deepest secrets without even realising it.