Anatomy of an affair

In an empty office space with sweeping views of midtown Manhattan, Dominic West and Maura Tierney are seated on a couch looking, well, miserable.

"I could have had anyone I wanted when I was young . . . I chose you," Tierney says, in character as Helen, half of a seemingly perfect Brooklyn couple whose marriage is torn asunder by infidelity in the new Showtime drama The Affair.

She may sound harsh but her husband, Noah, played by West, has probably earned the tongue- lashing. The seemingly loyal father of four has had an affair with Alison (played by Ruth Wilson), a married waitress from Montauk, the seaside town where Helen's wealthy family owns a home.

The couple are now in therapy trying to heal the rift but it's a struggle - in part because not even Noah really understands what drove him to cheat.

"I've been going over and over this in my mind for three months now," he says. "Why did I do it? What was I thinking?"

These questions are at the heart of The Affair, a series as interested in sex and romance as the elusiveness of memory and self-understanding that picked up two Golden Globes for best drama and best actress in a TV drama (Wilson's first Golden Globe).

Created by Sarah Treem and Hagai Levi, who collaborated on HBO's similarly themed In Treatment, the drama puts a fresh postmodern twist on infidelity, a subject that's become a virtual prerequisite of any series aspiring to the status of Quality Television.

Using the framing device of a criminal investigation, The Affair tells the story of Noah and Alison's relationship in flashbacks from each of their perspectives. In a kind of romantic version of (Akira Kurosawa's 1950 drama) Rashomon, their recollections often diverge wildly, leaving the viewer to interpret discrepancies both fleeting (the colour of a shirt, for example) and more significant (who made the first move).

"We wanted to do something from an idea we both had that truth was very subjective, that two people can be in the same relationship for years and can have radically different impressions of it," Treem says. "As writers, we were really fascinated by this possibility."

She and Levi decided that the protagonists would not be serial philanderers looking for ways out of their marriages but committed spouses who anguish over their attraction to each other.

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Anatomy of an affair