My lifelong curiosity about ‘people’ makes me psychoanalyze everybody and everything. In the last few years, the only show that allows me to do that to my heart’s content is Showtime’s The Affair.

The Affair has been exploring the emotional and psychological effects of an affair that shattered two marriages and the crime that keeps the star-crossed quartet intertwined. The first season (2014) was told from the adulterers’ perspectives; Noah Solloway (Dominic West) and Alison Bailey (Ruth Wilson). Sarah Treem, co-creator/executive producer, explained her stringent efforts not to judge them. “We kind of go into it believing that these were two good people who were committed to their marriages, that they weren’t serial philanderers. They weren’t looking to destroy anybody else’s happiness. And by chance, they’re both in very vulnerable places, and by chance, they meet somebody who they ultimately come to think is their true love.”

In Season 2 (2015), Treem added the perspectives of their spouses left behind, Helen Solloway (Maura Tierny) and Cole Lockhart (Joshua Jackson), and depicted the devastating aftermath of the affair. Due to my personal experience of being left by my husband, I related to them in so many ways. When Noah refused to unleash Alison from his Muse status and see her as flesh and blood with emotional baggage, I even saw bits and pieces of myself in her. The only character I never identified with is Noah. Trust me. I’m not judging…I just didn’t get him until he showed his true colors towards the end of Season 2. Noah confessed his dilemma to his therapist, ’Can a cheater be a great accomplished man at the same time?’ Seriously? It sounds like a narcissistic statement disguised as a conundrum. Or is this a male ego thing? You know what they say. Once a cheater, always a cheater.

So you can imagine my amazement when I read Treem’s answer to the NY Times reader’s question in ‘Ask a Show Runner’ dated November 18, 2015. “People are always like, ‘You must hate Noah.’ And I’m like, are you kidding? Noah is me. I love Noah. And, actually, I think the whole writers’ room feels that way. We are Noah’s biggest fans because he’s the character we most identify with.” I don’t hate him, but identify with him? Not!!!

Season 3 picks up three years after Noah was incarcerated for a crime he didn’t commit. He tries his best to disconnect from everybody while a man with agenda keeps him in constant torment and anguish. Helen, Alison, and Cole are all drowning in their guilt, shame, anger, and frustration. Noah’s reclusive life makes you wonder…Sure, he took the rap for Alison, his new wife, and Helen, the mother of his four children, but was that out of the goodness of his heart? He might have unconsciously chosen to be locked up in order to escape from the gigantic mess he had created. The fifth P.O.V. is provided by Noah’s kindred spirit, Prof. Juliette Le Gall (Irène Jacob), a French medievalist who escaped the harsh reality in search of dangerous liaison on campus.

Treem promises to double down again on the idea of perspective this season. “We sort of asked ourselves, like, do we all know ourselves that well, or is it possible that we have a conscious self and that there is also a dark side that we are not particularly conscious of, another self, sort of shadow self that is actually controlling a lot of our actions.” This certainly is better than reading Debbie Ford’s enlightening guide, The Dark Side of the Light Chasers. I will just sit back and enjoy the pages unfolding on screen every week.

The Affair returns Sunday, November 20, 2016 on Showtime.

About the Author

Meg Mimura is a TV critic who actually watches shows zealously in search of human drama worth watching. She is a member of Television Critics Association as well as Academy of Television Arts and Sciences.

A refreshing pause from today’s confrontational, harsh brand of humor, Amazon’s sweet-natured Red Oaks returns for a second season. Temporarily taking leave of its North Jersey fictional country club home, assistant tennis pro David Meyers (Craig Roberts) flies to Paris to be reunited with his major crush Skye (Alexandra Socha).

Finally everything appears to be falling in place for David, who’s been put through the mill during the premiere season. For starters, his parents (Richard Kind and Jennifer Grey) got divorced. This forced him to drop out of New York University and abandon his dreams of becoming a filmmaker. The one glimmer of hope that sustained him was his dream girl, the daughter of club president Doug Getty where he worked as an assistant tennis pro.

The operative phase here is mutual attraction for once the couple returns to the country club the real world again sets in. David finds himself caught in the middle between his strong-willed girlfriend and her equally stubborn father (Paul Reiser).

Adapting a few pages from the Caddyshack playbook, the rogue gallery of characters finds the roguish head pro Nash trying his hand at gold digging, while valet-turned bartender Wheeler continues to pursue his own lady love, while ex-spouses Sam and Judy check out the Jersey’s singles scene. Keep in mind that the coming-of-age comedy is set in the earlier, gentlier 1980s.

Autobiographical to a degree, Red Oaks was conceived by creators Gregory Jacobs and Joe Gangemi, while the series is filmed at River Vale’s Edgewood Country Club, just three miles from where Jacobs grew up. And like David, he aspired to be a filmmaker ever since he picked up a Super 8 camera as part of an after-school program. From there he started making his own films with a superhero called Super Chicken.

Having worked steadily alongside director Steven Soderbergh since the early 1990s, Jacobs continues to rake up those frequent flyer miles wining to Las Vegas for the Ocean’s Eleven movies, Behind the Candelabra which earned him an Emmy, to deep space for Solaris, and 1900s New York City for The Knick.

Jacobs noted, “We wanted to do something lighthearted and optimistic. We’ve been telling each other stories for years. So we wanted to put them all together in one place, kinda of a remembrance to all these crazy adventures we had and the ones we wished we had. It’s not about specific people, but rather a hodgepodge of people we’ve come across growing up. We started with the seed of autobiographical and then we quickly had to start making it up to make it more exciting and interesting.”

Without missing a beat Gangemi continued, “We’re both parents so we wanted to tell the kind of story we wanted to watch after a hard political day and also one a 20-year-old can still like. There are people like Paul, who is a villain on paper, but you still like and are curious about him. He loves his wife and daughter. He’s kinda a bad guy, but I think there’s a hopefulness to our show, which I don’t think is bad.”

Aside from being entertaining, Gangemi and Jacobs share another mutual goal. Jacobs elaborated, “One thing we consciously spent a lot of time on and what to continue in future seasons is what if you’re a kid growing up the burbs and you’re creative or interested in something that not necessarily your parents are into? It could be becoming a filmmaker, a musician, an artist or anything else and you’re not a rich kid. How do you do that – that dream? I think there are different challenges now, but I think kids in the suburbs still have the quarries.”

Upon parting at the end of the interview, Gangemi closed with one final invitation, “People who liked the first season should come back, because we believe season two is even better. As for people that have never seen Red Oaks you have almost a week to binge on the first season. They go down easy.”

Red Oaks returns November 11, 2016.

About the Author

Winnie Bonelli is a former entertainment editor for a daily metropolitan New York City area newspaper. She is passionate about movies and television and loves to take readers behind the scenes.