IMCranky

Interesting article about how the show needs to go to a third season and how "dark" season 2 will be ... http://www.elle.com/culture/movies-tv/news/a25425/sarah-treem-the-affair-golden-globes-interview/

I wonder if it was so much Sarah Treem's idea as Showtime's. (Spoilers follow for the run of Homeland, if you've never seen the show). This is the same network that supposedly forced the showrunners of Homeland to completely change the original intent of the series midstream by not killing Brody at the end of the first season - because of the popularity of, chemistry between, and accolades given to the two leads, and the network's apparent desire to create an epic love story, which seems similar to what may be going on here. In Homeland's case, it pretty much lead to a more convoluted story and implausible plotlines to try to make it work. The show to me didn't seem to course correct until they finally did what had been intended all along - to get rid of Brody. Don't know if that is actually what is going on with The Affair, but it sounds like the network's interference may be what Levi is alluding to in the article.

Oh, hell yes to Idris Elba ... Maybe his former co-stars Dominic West and Ruth Wilson can talk him into coming on The Affair and playing Helen's prior flirtation, Leon. Would love to see Helen get a chance to trade Noah in on a sexier model.

I totally get what you're saying Boundary about expanding the points of view -- whether it was going to happen was always the number one question asked of everyone associated with the show from the beginning and the answers usually seemed to be either hedging or emphasizing how it wouldn't happen this season. But the one response that struck me was Maura Tierney saying that she didn't think it was going to happen because she wasn't sure they'd want to "fracture the narrative" like that, so I can see where that happening against his original intent could be a deal breaker for Levi. What stuck out to me was him saying how he recognized the show getting away from being "art", and going into how the other show he and Sarah Treem did, In Treatment (which was an excellent show), was never intended to appeal to everyone, which was why I thought that making the affair within The Affair more "palatable" or "user friendly" would be something he'd find objectionable. The other thing that I was reacting to, and I'm sure I could be totally misinterpreting it, was him talking about always having the scene from the end of The Graduate in mind and within the show "when everything is over" how you're left in the same place -- I thought it interesting because it's not often that you see a show creator talking about what sounds like the envisioning of the ending unless that vision changed somewhere along the way.

Wow, that was an enlightening article. And it really explains the thing that's been niggling me about the show - that there does seem to have been a bit of a shift from the original intention. I remember when the show first started there were a lot of interviews and articles that talked about the psychologist/marriage counselor/therapist who really helped inform the writing, and also worked with some of the actors (although apparently Maura Tierney didn't really talk with her because she kind of didn't want to know stuff and bias her performance beforehand and would rather react to the scenes as they came up). But a lot was made about how this therapist's experience was that affairs aren't really about our partners or what's lacking in our relationships, but rather what's lacking in ourselves, and that, like Hagai Levi said, they really can happen to good marriages where there is love. I do think, and I know a lot of people will disagree, that they did try to show, at least in the very beginning episodes, that Noah and Helen did have a good marriage and there was love and friendship there. Not saying it was perfect and not saying that they didn't have problems, but as the series progressed it did seem to me that they had to make the marriage look worse and worse in order to try to justify the cheating. And I totally get what Hagai Levi was saying about The Graduate thing because based on what the psychologist was saying and what it looked like to me at the start, that's exactly where I had envisioned things heading - the grass is always greener, everything will be better and my life will fall into place if I just do this, type of thing only to realize that it's not better, it's the same because it wasn't that thing that needed to be changed in the first place. I had thought that where it was supposed to go was to show us that the tragedy of Noah and Alison was not the need to escape their marriages, but the futility of trying to escape themselves.

Noah's (and Alison's) obliviousness to the collateral damage of their actions seems to be the basis of this entire show.

I also was thrown a bit by the fact that Noah never told Helen about Scotty. Whatever else is going on in their marriage, Helen is right about parenting needing to be a team. I took her reaction about pressing charges to be a response to his making a non-action, pretend-it-didn't-happen to the situation by not telling her and her need to want to do something about it. Totally agree that Noah is an emotional coward, and I took his not saying what he knew about Scotty to have more to do with distancing from Alison and the Lockharts than about what it should have been - his teenage daughter's inappropriate relationship with a man almost twice her age and his wife's parental right to be informed. But I did think his attacking Scotty at the ranch rang true and fit with how we've seen him react violently a few times before - with Oscar and with Scotty. Noah is not only an emotional coward, he's an emotional teenager, with no impulse control. I thought the immature teenage lover, Romeo & Juliet scenario very apt with regards to Noah - he's a walking hormone who acts rashly with no thought to the consequences of his actions or their effects on others.

I do follow Sarah Treem on Twitter and I don't know that she's irked so much about some of the dislike of Noah as really intrigued by it. I did see a lengthy (I think it was like an hour long) interview with her where at one point she talked about realizing that they may not have done as great a job with the character development with Noah as they did with Alison (and where she and the interviewer got into this weird but interesting discussion about whether the way Dominic West is playing him contributes to that). I got the impression that she came to this realization because of what she was reading online, and talked about how they hoped to rectify it in the second season.

Yeah, I questioned this same thing in the Speculation thread. Was wondering if Planned Parenthood would still have the security tapes a few years after the altercation, or is it more likely that the detective got the private investigator's video from either Helen or her mother.

Jeffrey Reiner, the director, confirmed on Twitter after the show aired that Alison and Noah ARE married in the future. And there has to be a reason coming up that would cause her to think that he might doubt her.

Would Planned Parenthood still have the video of the altercation between Noah and Scotty a few years on, or would they have already cycled their security tapes? So, who gave the detective the footage from Planned Parenthood - Helen or her mom?

I found this interview with Sarah Treem really interesting because she didn't think Helen would be sympathetic either and what Maura Tierney really made out of the role:http://www.vanityfair.com/vf-hollywood/2014/12/the-affair-season-finale-interview

Liked this interview with Sarah Treem and the new perspectives we may get next season: http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/live-feed/affair-creator-finales-big-reveal-759796

Elements in both perspectives this episode were completely unbelievable -- Noah is so amazing that he can easily lay anything with a pulse, then he's so amazing that he's written the best book ever and we'll start a false bidding war just so we can throw even more money at his feet; In one fell swoop Alison can save the lives of her lover, his wife and daughter, and her husband from himself; her lover is so overcome with gratitude and love for her that he again immediately dumps his wife and his freaked-out-just-had-life-threatened-at-gunpoint daughter to completely appropriately embrace her in the middle of her mother-in-law's kitchen.

Vaguely disappointed that the end game is to validate and reward cheating. Hope Season 2 does not degenerate into showcasing the cliched bitterness of discarded spouses. As much as I would love to see Maura Tierney chew that scenery, I really don't want to see the narrative of the overused spiteful, scorned ex-wife versus the angelic vision in white of Alison.