A new trailer has surfaced for the second series of The Affair, the Golden Globe-winning infidelity drama told from the differing perspectives of its two lead characters. The trailer itself is exactly what you would expect it to be – it looks like we are in for another rip-roaring funride of anguished pauses, mournful hugging and people punching inanimate objects while trying their damnedest not to look as if they’ve just really hurt themselves – but that’s not the point. The point is that there didn’t really need to be a second series of The Affair.
The final episode of the first series just aired in the UK. I know this because I distinctly remember spending that evening holding my head in my hands and wailing the word “Why?” over and over again. Because the series ended incredibly badly. Until that point, The Affair had been a decent little drama with a cute central conceit. But the final episode trashed all that, turning a programme that could have ended on a definitively elegant grace note into a cack-handed murder mystery that thudded in out of nowhere and clunked everyone across the head in the blind hope that we’d all be too concussed to realise how stupid it was.
The final cliffhanger felt like an ugly afterthought – like the sort of tone-deaf scene added to films that have long since been abandoned by their original directors – tacked on explicitly to gee up interest for the next series. The murder investigation had been sporadically alluded to throughout the run but, viewing the series as a whole, it seemed like it had been shoehorned in at the last minute to keep a good thing going. It was ugly, and it was unnecessary, but it wasn’t entirely unprecedented.
In the US, The Affair airs on Showtime, and Showtime has form when it comes to not knowing when to quit. Homeland, too, is a Showtime programme, and one that equally should have ended after a single series. Think of all the miseries we would have been spared if the show had ended with Brody blowing himself up. The pacemaker murder. The Venezuelan paedophile. All those gruesome sex scenes. Bloody Dana. Dexter, too, suffered similar problems, fencing itself in for such a long time that the only possible escape was to glue pubes to Michael C Hall’s face and make him chop down a tree.
By no means is Showtime the only offender, either. BBC2’s The Fall is a textbook example of a show determined to stagger on, no matter how infuriating it gets. The first series? A brilliant game of cat and mouse, seemingly designed to climax with a spectacular confrontation between the two leads. But then it ended with a desperately noncommittal telephone conversation instead, and we had to suffer through a gormless second series where everyone got to baldly state their motivations as many times as they could. Still, at least that series ended with Jamie Dornan’s character being shot. Except that then he ended up being revived for a third series, because someone at BBC2 must really hate us.
For The Affair to chuck us a frustrating non-sequitur in the place of a satisfying conclusion stinks of cowardice. I’m not sure I can bring myself to even watch the next series now. All the trust is gone. What if that series ends with another useless cliffhanger? What if it ends with Ruth Wilson receiving a letter from her dead son saying, “Hi Ma, I’m not actually dead, come and find me”? What if it ends with Dominic West’s daughter befriending the president’s son and running over a stranger? What if they all peel off their skin-suits to reveal that they were all giant lizards all along? At this stage, this isn’t a chance I’d be willing to take.
