The Affair - Season One

Any relationship is bound to be a "He Said / She Said" proposition -- or, for some percentage of us, a "He / He Said" or "She Said / She Said" one. For the Showtime original series "The Affair," the complete ten-episode first season of which is now available on home release, that idea is explored to effects both comic and dramatic.

Noah ("The Wire"'s Dominic West) is a happily married man and up-and-coming novelist with four kids and a difficult second book on his hands. His wife Helen (Maura Tierney, "ER") comes from a wealthy family; her father Bruce (John Doman, another "Wire" alumnus) is also a novelist -- quite a successful one. When Noah, Helen, and kids stay the summer in beachside resort town Montauk with Bruce and Margaret (Kathleen Chalfont), Helen's mother, it's as though Noah is peering into some sort of evil mirror universe version of his own life.

But Montauk offers Noah a distraction from struggles both creative and procreative in the form of Ali (Ruth Wilson), a waitress at a local diner. Noah can't get Ali's long legs and flirtatious smile out of his head. What he doesn't grasp -- at least at first -- is that Ali is a wounded shoulder and grieving mother. The loss of her young son a couple of years before has driven a wedge between her and Cole (Joshua Jackson), her husband.

The complexities of the affair Noah and Ali become embroiled in are charted, beat by beat, in episodes that tell and then re-tell each segment of the story, first from one point of view (usually his) and then from the other (usually it's she who gets the second half of the hour). The scenes in which their narratives overlap are told with differences in dialogue, action, costume, and mood. Sometimes the differences in how the two versions play out are small, but telling; other times, the divergences are dramatic, with two very different and mutually exclusive takes on a single detail leading to irreconcilable differences in how events unfold.

And yet, this is all part of the same story -- as are the scenes that bookend each episode, scenes in which Noah and Ali are individually grilled by a police detective looking into a murder. It takes most of the season to find out who the corpse is, and it's clear from the start that at least a year or so has passed between the events Noah and Ali are relating and the interrogations. It all leads up to a cliffhanger, by which time you've either tuned out (the pace is too slow for some viewers) or become helplessly, maddeningly hooked. (I fall into the latter camp, but then I don't need to see something blowing up ever six minutes. The slow build toward the show's eventual emotional detonations intrigues me more than any fireball.)

Montauk itself is a small town with long-simmering feuds and disagreements, and its denizens provide any number of juicy subplots that crisscross in and out of the main narrative. One swaggering hunk gets a too-young girl pregnant; a family matriarch mortgages a family business past the point of sustainability; a local businessman plans for controversial expansion at the risk of disrupting the town's sleepy rhythms. It's the perfect setting; after all, you don't leave the big city for the quiet of a comparatively rural village just so you can import the over-the-top theatrics of big network action shows. "The Affair" is meant to unfold slowly, its pace giving time for all the nastiness its characters keep hidden away to come bubbling up.

The first season DVD set includes five short "Character profiles," including one for the town of Montauk itself. Also included is another short spot, one that looks at the differences in the two narrations by way of the costuming and other elements used to differentiate them.

A fourth disc holds a raft of bonus material, but none of it is specific to "The Affair." Rather, this is a sampler of other Showtime offerings: the first two episodes of "Hippyish," and the premier episodes of "Ray Donovan" and "Madam Secretary."

That's nice, but it's the content of the first three discs that sold me on the series. When Season Two arrives, I'll be eagerly waiting.

"The Affair - Season One"
DVD
$39.98
http://store.sho.com/the-affair-season-1-dvd/detail.php?p=855872