THE AFFAIR: Sarah Treem, Joshua Jackson, and Maura Tierney Preview Season 2’s Perspective Shifts

THE AFFAIR is shaking things up in its second season.

With the first year telling the story of Noah and Alison’s affair from their perspectives, the sophomore season will showcase the fallout of the Noah/Helen and Alison/Cole marriage by showing all four of their stories.

And with that change comes a slight format shift. The first season of THE AFFAIR showed both POVs regularly, but with four perspectives to juggle, the show will shift who it showcases week-by-week.

“For the most part, it’s still going to be two perspectives,” THE AFFAIR co-creator Sarah Treem told reporters at the recent TCA panel. “The question is whose two perspectives. So the show takes off in what I think is sort of an interesting prismatic approach to storytelling where you’ll see sort of pieces of the story from all four POVs, and then you’ll start to understand as the show keeps going basically how those four POVs are sort of funneling together, which they do do by the end.”

The change in formatting has also allowed for its actors to dive deeper into their roles.

“By allowing Cole to have an interior life, it allows me to show him in a way that being Noah’s recollection or Alison’s recollection just doesn’t,” Joshua Jackson (Cole) said. “And you can see those insecurities and the frailties. And particularly where we find him in season 2, those feelings of inadequacy and just being desolate when we finally come to him in a way that is not possible when you are being when you’re in somebody else’s memory, because that tends to flatten things and make you two dimensional. So it’s opened up for me an entirely different world for this character.”

“I just feel that initially when we started shooting it, I, by default, went more towards Noah’s version of Helen because…that’s what I was playing more and that’s what I was in,” Maura Tierney (Helen) added. “And then I sort of realized, of course, what’s going to be revealed no matter how I’m feeling. And hopefully what the writing tried to do, too, is show that she’s perhaps a little bit more responsible for the events, that it’s sort of her becoming aware of how she was complicit in the weakness of the marriage, which I think will be interesting to watch.”

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THE AFFAIR returns Sunday, October 4th at 10 PM on Showtime.

Related:

THE AFFAIR Season 2 Trailer
Showtime Announces HOMELAND, THE AFFAIR Premiere Date, Reveals HOMELAND’s Key Art
THE AFFAIR Season 2: Showtime Releases Key Art, New Teaser

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