In this episode of “The Affair” … well, there’s a lot going on.

There always is. Each installment of Sarah Treem’s series is so rich with incidents and events, often seen from overlapping viewpoints, that writing about them can feel more like cataloging than reviewing. Fortunately, the characters often take on this burden themselves.

Take the Vanity Fair reporter who opens the hour with a Cliff’s Notes version of Noah Solloway’s life story. By her reckoning, he’s a public-school teacher from Brooklyn who wrote a hit book, left his wife and kids, married his mistress, got famous, got reckless, got behind the wheel of a car and ran over his mistress’s brother-in-law, went to jail, went back to teaching underprivileged kids, and wrote a new and better book.

“You’ve come full circle,” she says. It’s a big circle.

Or listen to how Noah describes his breakup with Janelle, his boss-turned-girlfriend, three months after the fact: “You disappeared after my ex-wife’s boyfriend’s funeral and then never returned my calls.” It’s a neat way of eliding the dissolution of the relationship. It’s also a humorous reminder that getting ghosted at the memorial service for the partner of your ex is a rather rare occurrence.

Or get a load of all the houseguests Helen Solloway rattles off to her new boyfriend, Sasha Mann, in flagrante: “My daughter, my son, his boyfriend, my mother, and my neighbor and her baby.” Thanks to a previous conversation, other key details — her ex-husband wants her to tell her daughter to call off her wedding; her mother wants her to move back east to care for her father, who has Alzheimer’s; her neighbor’s baby was fathered by the aforementioned dead partner — are given.

Such lists have the benefit of catching viewers (or recap readers) up quickly. And while boiling the plot and players down to lists makes the show sound soapy, there’s nothing wrong with soapiness, per se. The problem with this reductive approach is that it masks how well the series maps to the messiness that is adult life.

Stop for a moment and think about the problems you’re currently facing, major and minor. You can probably come up with quite a laundry list yourself, right? With the possible exception of dating a movie star (that’s Helen) or having your screenplay rewritten on the fly by one (that’s Noah), we’re not as different from the Solloways as we might like to think.

I reviewed this week’s fine episode of The Affair for the New York Times.