It’s hard to keep the attention of TV viewers. If there’s not a dedicated fanbase built early on whose appetite is whetted between seasons, as there was with Game of Thrones for example, it can be difficult for shows to bring the audience back. The solution for some series has been to repeatedly reinvent themselves, offering a new entry point with each subsequent season. But does it work? Well, sometimes.
The Affair, which returns to Showtime on 20 November with its third season, cast off in 2014 with an intriguing premise: each episode showcased the same scenes from two viewpoints – one from married novelist Noah Solloway (Dominic West) and the other from struggling waitress Alison Lockhart (Ruth Wilson). As the inaugural season unfolded, we got to see how differently two people can view the same thing. The show, created by Sarah Treem and Hagai Levi, was a lesson in perspective and narrative form. It felt compelling because it was original and duly won awards because of it. It also unveiled a central mystery – the murder of a secondary character – which the show refused to solve in its first 10 episodes.
As much as people liked it, though, viewers wondered how the premise could sustain. Was it interesting to keep watching these same two people uncover the same situations? Treem and Levi had a solution for season two: change the narrative structure, relocate the action from Montauk to Manhattan, and bring in new characters. Instead of two perspectives, season two had four. At its close, the second season finally solved the mystery of the first. But where now?
Last year, Treem told the New York Times: “Television audiences have become so savvy and there’s so much out there to choose from that I, at least, am quite aware that you have to give your audience something new to come back to, season after season, in order to keep their interest. They expect to be challenged.”
So season three is yet another reinvention. There are new perspectives, a three-year time jump, less of a formal structure and another mystery – of sorts. The first three episodes of the season feel scattered, giving us very little sense of where most of the characters are now and why we should still care. It’s unclear whether this is a reinvention done for reinvention’s sake, or whether it will actually challenge the viewers. It’s similar to what Lost did for several seasons, constantly reframing the narrative to give it a fresh feeling each year. It’s what Homeland did last year and will do again next year when season six premieres on Showtime in January.
For Homeland, there was a sense of finality after the loss of a major character at the end of season three. That character was the impetus for most of the action prior to his death, which could have put Homeland into a creative rut. But instead of getting stuck, the show used that loss as a liberation. The show-runners relocated the narrative to Kabul, then to Berlin, and in the upcoming season they will tackle terrorism in New York City.
The ongoing shifts allow for new characters to feel organic rather than forced and for the show to purge things that don’t work (remember Brody’s annoying kids?). It’s a strategy that clearly works for anthology series, such as Ryan Murphy’s American Horror Story, which retains cast members and concepts each season but switches its theme and setting. Likewise, Murphy’s American Crime Story will shift its focus from OJ Simpson in season one to Hurricane Katrina in season two and Gianni Versace’s murder in season three.
Audiences clearly like these self-contained yet connected seasons. People want things to feel fresh – and for good reason. While it might work to have characters in the same place doing the same things repeatedly on a sitcom like Modern Family or The Big Bang Theory, that can get stale on a drama, especially a high-concept one like The Affair. After a few seasons, Lost got trapped by its own plot devices. At some point, the show-runners started changing things up because it was expected, not because it was actually necessary to the storyline or the characters.
So will this work on The Affair? Can the show sustain these constant narrative shifts for several more years to come? The first three episodes don’t really offer a concrete reply. Maybe it’s a gimmick to keep viewers onboard, or maybe it’s integral to the story at play. Either way, one theory is that we prefer our dramas to evolve because we ourselves want to. If Noah Solloway or Carrie Mathison can reimagine their lives, we can as well. We see a reflection of ourselves in that sensibility. TV shows have to change in order to survive and, perhaps, so do we.
