So I watched all five seasons of this show in about a month, and even though I have some mixed feelings about various storylines, even before I was completely finished, I was thinking that I want to go back and rewatch it from the beginning right away and experience it again knowing what's going to happen. I'm not sure if I've ever felt that way with a show before, especially one like this that is sometimes hard to watch.
Dominic West stars as Noah Solloway, an English teacher and novelist who spends his summers in Montauk, New York with his wife, Helen (Maura Tierney); their four children, Whitney (Julia Goldani Telles), Martin (Jake Siciliano), Trevor (Jason Sand), and Stacey (Leya Catlett/Abigail Dylan Harrison); and his wealthy in-laws, Margaret (Kathleen Chalfant) and Bruce (John Doman). They seem like a happy family, though Noah's in-laws aren't particularly nice to him; he isn't rich like them, nor is he as successful of a novelist as his father-in-law. On their way into town the summer our story begins, the Solloways stop for lunch at a restaurant called the Lobster Roll, where Stacey starts to choke on her food; she is saved by a waitress named Alison Lockhart (Ruth Wilson). Noah and Alison keep crossing paths, develop an attraction to each other, and eventually embark on an affair. The show shifts back and forth between Noah and Alison's perspectives as they tell their stories to a police detective for reasons that aren't made clear until later; to hear Noah tell it, she practically threw herself at him. From Alison's point of view, she met Noah at a low point in her life when she was recovering from a personal tragedy and when her own marriage (to Cole Lockhart, played by Joshua Jackson) was in trouble, and Noah made her feel something other than pain for the first time in years. Eventually, we learn why Noah and Alison are talking to the police; the affair is revealed to/found out by Noah and Alison's spouses; and we move past the affair to its aftermath. The show expands beyond Noah and Alison's perspectives to include those of Helen, Cole, Whitney, and other characters that we don't meet until later seasons.
One thing that surprised me about this show is how much happens; the affair is revealed before the end of the first season, and Helen kicks Noah out almost immediately. Still we have more than four seasons of the show to go. The main thing that I took away is that though a love affair can be all-consuming enough to make you prioritize it above everything else and essentially blow up your life, that doesn't make the relationship forged from it fated or permanent; once it's out in the open, you still have to move on with your day-to-day lives, and those lives don't always fit the way you want them to. Another major theme is how far-reaching the effects of an affair are; to the two people involved, it feels so private and intimate, yet it affects the lives of so many other people for so many years to come.
I had mixed feelings about the show's treatment of women. Many times, when a woman who has been through a lot finally finds happiness or learns to stand up for herself, the show, for lack of a better phrase, shits on her. For example, after Helen and Noah divorce, she falls in love with Vik Ullah (Omar Metwally), a surgeon who operates on Helen and Noah's son, Martin, who is diagnosed with Crohn's disease fairly early in the series. Though Helen initially holds Vik at arm's length and she never truly seems to get over Noah, they forge a happy life together; he treats her kids well; and they all move to Los Angeles. No sooner does this happen than Vik is diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, which he refuses treatment for and ultimately dies from-- though not before Vik, who basically seems to be a nice guy, has a one-night stand with and impregnates his and Helen's twenty-nine year old neighbor, Sierra (Emily Browning), and not before Vik's mother, Priya (Zenobia Shroff), berates Helen every chance she gets, largely simply for being at the tail end of childbearing age, for being divorced, and for already having children of her own. This continues after Vik's death. Helen begins dating an actor named Sasha Mann (Claes Bang), and one night Helen refuses Priya's last-minute request to bring Vik and Sierra's baby, Eddie, to meet Priya's brother, who is in town for one night only, and to pretend that the baby is hers. Helen's refusal seems reasonable; she already has plans, and she doesn't want to lie. However, Priya shows up at Helen's doorstep to inform her that her own parents and brother disowned her for marrying a Muslim; that this was the first time she was seeing her brother in decades; and that all she wanted was to give him a chance to see his great-nephew without dishonoring her late son's memory. She tells Helen that Vik was always telling her what a selfless person Helen was, but she obviously had him fooled. It's like any time Helen starts to be happy or stands up for herself, the show has to beat her down.
The most egregious example of the show punishing women is, of course, the way Alison's story ends (HUGE SPOILERS AHEAD). To make a long, complicated story short, after Alison's marriages to both Cole and Noah end, she begins a relationship with a veteran named Ben Cruz (Ramon Rodriguez). Ben initially holds back from starting a relationship with her, supposedly because he is a recovering alcoholic and he has been advised against dating early in his recovery. We, the audience, and eventually Alison, learn that the real reason is that he is married. When Alison confronts him about this, he becomes enraged, calling her a seductress, saying that it is her fault that he has started drinking again, and telling her that he will only leave her alone if she admits that this is all her fault. She refuses to do so, stating that he is a grown man who is responsible for his own decisions. We are proud of her for standing up for herself. Her reward is to be murdered, thrown into the ocean, and have her death ruled as a suicide. From a storytelling perspective, this has a tragic, "full circle" quality, as the major cause for the tension in Alison and Cole's marriage was the accidental drowning death of their son, Gabriel. You can't help but wish the show had done better by Alison, though, than to have her head literally bashed in seconds after she finally tells a man to grow up and stop blaming her for his own mistakes and shortcomings.
There is also a "#metoo" storyline that adds to this pattern, and that I had mixed feelings about. Descent, the fictionalized account that Noah writes about his and Alison's affair, is ultimately made into a movie. In the lead-up to its release, Vanity Fair publishes an article about Noah in which a former publicist states that he tried to coerce her into sex while they were on a book tour; a former student-teacher states the she did have sex with him when she was working at the same school as him; and a former student states that he verbally abused her in class (an event she chronicled in a book). We, the audience, saw all of these events happen over the course of the series; none of them seemed particularly significant at the time, and the incidents with the publicist and the student-teacher came across as consensual (though problematic because of the uneven power dynamics at play). The point seems to be that while each incident individually takes place in the grey area of "problematic, but not necessarily sexual harassment," taken together they show a pattern of disrespect towards women that Noah should be held accountable for. I was fine with the point they eventually got to, but because it does seem that at least one of the women is lying; because one of the women is depicted as fairly unlikable; and because Helen (at least from Whitney's perspective) makes excuses for Noah, it initially seemed like they were sending a weird message about #metoo as a whole. They got to a fairly interesting and nuanced discussion of the issue, but they took a weird path there.
I will also say-- and I'm not sure if this was intentional or not-- that I felt an emotional distance from the characters that kept me from being as moved/affected by some of the events as I might expect. This is a series in which one of the core four characters is freaking murdered unexpectedly, whose murderer is never held accountable, and whose daughter and ex-husbands spend years thinking she committed suicide. This is a series in which we learn that two of the main characters lost a young son in a drowning accident and that their marriage has never been the same since. This is a series in which a main character's romantic partner, who is a major part of the show for two seasons, dies of cancer. I felt bad for these characters insofar in that I felt that these events were unfair, or tragic, or unfortunate. However, I was not emotionally wrecked in the way that I have been by series such as, say, Parenthood or Six Feet Under. I wonder if this is because the shifting perspectives lead you not to empathize with any one character, but rather to view the events as studies in how different people perceive/react to upsetting circumstances? I'm not sure; I was just surprised that I wasn't more emotionally affected by certain events.
The performances are all top-notch, especially Maura Tierney as Helen, who had a fairly thankless role that wound up having a lot of depth. Again, I think it would be a good show to watch again now that I know what happens so that I wouldn't just be watching to see how the plot unfolds.
No comments:
Post a Comment