'No One Ever Really Knows What's Going On In Anyone Else's Marriage, Right?'

The first season of The Affair having established that Noah Solloway has had very few sexual partners before meeting the woman who would become his wife when they were both in college, we probably should have predicted what would happen once said wife finally kicked him out: that he'd be engulfed by a veritable tsunami of pussy. Sure, he has to keep up appearances, kind of, for the sake of the four children he still has to see sometimes -- or, at least, for the two younger ones who are still willing to see him. But the rest of the time, he's just picking up girls in their twenties, nailing them (once each, apparently), and moving on to the next one. Noah is so pussy-drunk that when one of his fellow teachers catches his eye, he sneaks her into the school after hours to bang her out. A janitor sees them, reacting with a disgusted eye roll that makes him the season MVP as far as I'm concerned.

The janitor narcs on them, and Noah gets sent to the rubber room. I'm not sure this is an especially just sentence -- it's not like they were going at it during fourth period or something -- but on principle I have to support any punitive measure levied against Noah's carnal gluttony. More importantly, though: it's a depiction of the rubber room! One of New York's most elusive secret places! What happens in these holding pens? How do their inmates relate to each other and pass the potentially endless time? Why couldn't Hagai Levi and Sarah Treem have written a show about that?!

I'm just so sick of watching infidelity, you guys. It's so expected, and so boring. I mean, I know that only once in a generation do TV viewers get treated to a portrayal of a model marriage like the Taylors' of Friday Night Lights, but that doesn't mean drama writers should just give up trying.

In most ways, The Affair is a very conventional story revolving around two people who have different but pretty standard reasons for betraying their spouses: she's sad, and he's bored. What's supposed to set it apart is the Diet Rashomon treatment of the plot -- which, I think, is the aspect of the show that works the best, for the way it reveals the protagonists through their sometimes very different memories of the same events. But this whole business of a murder investigation in another timeline laid over the story just feels like that moment early on in the season when Noah is pitching his book to Harry, Bruce's editor, and when Harry says that the story of a guy having an affair with a vacation-spot townie is something he's read before, Noah's like, "He kills her." OOOOH, I GUESS THIS ISN'T A REAL-WORLD STORY ABOUT NORMAL PEOPLE WHO ARE GOOD AT PROBLEM-SOLVING AFTER ALL! MURDER STAKES!!!

At the end of this first season, I just don't feel like this story has taught me anything new about why people cheat. Giving Harry the line "Not everyone has a wife as hot as yours" in the finale is both a gross dismissal of all the not-hot wives whose husbands, I guess, are entitled to fuck around on them according to Harry, but a reminder of what a true shit Noah is: even in his own version of Helen, she hasn't done anything to merit his disrespect. As she reminds him in their big confrontation in the finale (ending with her announcing that she wants him back?! Helen, come on), she was the woman he chose, because he wanted a certain kind of life and knew she could give it to him -- and she did. If he came to hate her, he was really just hating himself, and all his own dumb choices. And if the point of making Noah's wife a smart, beautiful, accomplished, stylish woman is that his cheating wasn't really about her...like, we're all adults. Noah's infidelity doesn't have to be a direct rebuke to Helen, for not being able to give him something or other he wants, to be a terrible, life-ruining attack on her.

Alison is the more sympathetic of the two cheaters, not just because she's lost a child and her husband is a living reminder of him, but because she's been trapped by her circumstances thanks to an absent, basically unfit mother, and gotten herself embroiled in criminal activity that was the price she had to pay for being part of a large, warm family -- or one that presents itself that way, at least. But the finale kind of undermines her, too: it shows her having figured out that she needs to make herself happy, and that selling her house and leaving Montauk will probably get her there, and then throws stupid Noah back into her path and, as the flash-forward shows, undo all the good work she did on herself. Thanks a pantload, stupid Whitney, with your idiotic romantic plans to run away with Scotty!

AND YET, despite all my annoyance with The Affair -- and, clearly, it bugs me on a lot of levels -- it's still a surprisingly watchable show. It's well cast and well acted, and even when you want to punch out the characters, there's a variety of different types of beautiful décor to distract you temporarily. And now that Noah's actually been arrested for Scotty's murder, it'll be interesting to see how the format and plot change in Season 2. My prediction: Cole killed Scotty. My wish: Alison cheats on Noah so that he finally understands what a scumbag he was to my beloved Helen.