I am not much of a television watcher. In fact, I was unsure of how to turn my t.v. on for many years, which remote and the sequence of buttons to click, but was never motivated enough to learn. That was until “True Detectives” with Woody Harrelson and Matthew McConaughey on HBO last year. Now, Showtime is previewing a series entitled “The Affair“, which promises to feature an honest, slightly empathetic or at least justified look at the complicated and much maligned subject of marriage and cheating. As enticingly introduced in Cara Buckley’s write up on September 3rd in the New York Times (thanks to Frank Jelnicky for passing this on to me), “Imagine an extra marital love affair in which neither party can be blamed.” Cognizant of the touchiness of the subject, the Israeli writer Hagai Levi notes the challenge of writing something compelling and engaging, serious, without elicited “knee-jerk audience disapproval.” In addition to the promised feature of the landscape of beaches along Long Island, I am looking forward to seeing how the writer and producer’s efforts achieve that challenging goal in their measured choice in casting and intimate, dicey subject matter.
I guess it is time to take lessons in television operations.
In the gaze of the other 