The Affair: A drama that demands you pay attention

Last night, Showtime premiered the first episode of its mystery-drama The Affair — a series that demands a closer viewing than pretty much any other drama on television. (If you missed it, or don't subscribe to Showtime, you can watch the first episode here.) Yes, The Affair is about an affair — an apparently ill-fated one, since both Noah (Dominic West) and Alison (Ruth Wilson) have been forced to describe its details to a police detective. But the show's real subject is subjectivity: what we remember, what we forget, and what we're willing to admit about both.

The pilot is split cleanly down the middle: The first half of the episode addresses Noah's recollection of the beginning of the affair, and the second half depicts Alison's take on the same period of time. Think True Detective, but with less grotesque murder and existential rambling, and you'll be in the right ballpark.

By his own account, Noah is a perfectly happy family man: a beautiful brownstone in Brooklyn, a reasonably successful first novel, a loving wife (Maura Tierney), and four kids. "There is no 'but,'" he says, after rattling off all the reasons he had not to cheat on his wife. "When I look back, I can't tell you why it happened."

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But despite Noah's shoulder-shrugging, little off-notes of dissatisfaction keep bleeding through in the story he's telling. He describes two separate occasions in which his children interrupt him in the middle of sex with his wife; he paints both of his in-laws as monsters; and he implicitly casts himself as the underappreciated hero. Noah's version of Alison is straight from the pages of Penthouse: endlessly seductive and relentless in her pursuit of him, stripping down to transparent pink underwear as she asks him to take a shower with her.

Alison's story is different. She describes herself as depressed and fragile, making ends meet as a waitress at a local diner and struggling to connect with her husband (Joshua Jackson) in the wake of a personal tragedy. In Alison's telling, Noah is the aggressor: tracking her down after an incident at the diner, flirting with her after a chance encounter on the beach, and making an awkward attempt to kiss her — which she immediately rebuffs.

The key to The Affair is that it's impossible to make Noah and Alison's stories line up — but it's totally unclear why. Is one of them lying? Are both of them lying? Or have they unconsciously recast their own transgressions in a more flattering light, as a way of coping with the role they each played in the beginning of the affair? The show requires close viewing to tease out the small discrepancies — the length of a skirt, or a different brand of cigarettes. But the basic details of the affair are so drastically different that it's hard to imagine someone isn't intentionally trying to lead the detective astray.

As of the first episode, it's not even clear why the detective is interested in Noah and Alison. But taken as a device, the police interview format builds some fascinating complexity into the very structure of the narrative — particularly when it comes to sex.

TV shows don't always handle this kind of nuance very well. (See the justified outrage over what was widely interpreted by critics and viewers as a rape scene in Game of Thrones, which the episode's director defended as consensual sex.) An emotionally fraught scene in The Affair's first episode uses both Noah and Alison's perspectives to explore the line between rough consensual sex and rape — and how the same encounter can look and feel very different to two people based on their individual contexts.

The narrative structure also makes me far more charitable to what I'd otherwise dismiss as The Affair's flaws. Noah's in-laws are so one-dimensionally vapid that it borders on ridiculous; his mother-in-law tells his daughter that she'll take her on a trip to Paris if she keeps losing weight, and his father-in-law drops constant, veiled insults about Noah's failure to produce a second novel. But because this is Noah's story, these thin caricatures of awful in-laws might be totally divorced from what they're actually like. We won't know unless they appear in their own interrogation scene — which is, as far as I can tell, the only place in the pilot that isn't inherently colored by a narrator's biases.

There is one caveat: the chance that The Affair will totally fall apart in its second episode. Pilots are shot months before a series is actually ordered, and most shows change dramatically in that time. (The usefulness of seeing more than one episode before rendering a critical judgment was particularly apparent last week, when Homeland aired a solid premiere, then totally botched its second episode.) For that reason, networks generally send critics more than a single episode of a TV series — but for whatever reason, only one episode of The Affair was made available in advance.

With all that in mind, I'll say this: This fall's lineup of new TV shows has been unusually weak, and The Affair is easily one of the most promising. West, Wilson, Tierney, and Jackson are powerhouse performers, and no show I've watched this fall demands or merits such close attention. But in the end, all of this is just my take; watch The Affair yourself, and add your own interpretation into the mix.