The Affair: Season 4

The Affair is a show I really liked for two seasons. Then it fell off the rails in its third season. Here's its fourth, which falls probably somewhere in between. My biggest concern for the show as it enters its fifth season is that it's just completely run out of story to tell.

I've already talked about one or two of the most interesting episodes with Sween, the only other guy I know who watches this thing. For those who don't or haven't - but are still reading this for whatever reason - the series begins with an extramarital affair. Noah and Alison are cheating with each other on respective spouses Helen and Cole during Noah and Helen's summer trip to Montauk. The first season is told in alternating Alison and Noah perspectives, and it's interesting to see the Rashomon effect right out of the gate, with each of them remembering or even just interpreting events differently. Where does the truth lie? Probably somewhere in between, right?

Season 2 expands to include Helen and Cole's perspectives. Now Noah and Alison are getting married - meaning they've gotten divorced from Helen and Cole - and all four of them still manage to get brought back together by a needless but interesting enough tragedy and trial.

Season 3 - and here's where things go south - Season 3 jumps ahead by three years. Noah and Alison are already divorced. So now the show's just about four divorced people, leading four largely separate lives - occasionally interacting, yes, but otherwise just doing their own things. So almost entirely gone now is the initial gimmick of the Rashomon effect. We're only seeing most events through one person's eyes at this point, and frankly there's little reason for any of these characters to be hanging out together at all. The original couples still have kids and all, but what are we doing here? And to top it off, there's a fifth character completely needlessly brought in to have a fifth perspective, a French professor who never shows up again after Season 3. Why?

Season 4, finally, does come up with some organic reasons for these four people to keep coming back to each other. But it accomplishes this by - SPOILERS! - killing off both Alison and also Helen's new husband. (And not because the two of them had an affair or anything - wouldn't that have been an interesting wrinkle!) The show's upcoming final season is confirmed to be its last, but really, what's left to do or say here? Will they write out Cole, entirely, and leave us with a final Noah-and-Helen season about co-parenting in LA? Will Noah and Cole work together, or perhaps against each other, to uncover the truth about Alison's death? (It was ruled a suicide, but was it?)

It just seems like a show whose initial premise was more or less, "The 'truth' is whatever you want it to be, depending on who you are," ought to be so fascinating, especially here in 2018, but instead the show just needs to wrap up the stories of these three remaining broken, damaged, wealthy, middle-aged white people. But we'll see!