“The Affair” takes the work of adulthood seriously. That is different than saying that adults on “The Affair” always behave in a serious manner, or what passes for it in narrative fiction. Alison, Noah, Cole, Helen and all their various relatives, friends and lovers rarely make the linear progress we’d like to see from ourselves, or rise and fall in the more predictable arcs we enjoy from television characters.

They circle back on the same issues and reprocess the same traumas, yet they hide others for years. They repeatedly fall hard when Mr. or Ms. Right appears to come along, not letting past transformations into Mr. or Ms. Wrong stand in the way. And they hash it all out in arguments and heart-to-hearts, in therapeutic settings and in impetuous getaways, in sexual encounters that are as much about figuring things out as they are about feeling good. No one here is “adulting like a boss,” as the ultimately infantile pop culture phrase goes. On “The Affair,” people do adulthood like nine-to-fivers, like tipped workers, like freelancers with unstable incomes. It’s work, and it’s more refreshing than a dip in the ocean.

I continue to make the case for The Affair at the New York Times with my review of this week’s episode.

“All right, so, let me get this straight. She was married to you, and then she cheated with you, and then she left you for you, and then she cheated on you with you, and then she had your baby, but then said it was your baby. Did I get that right?”

Sure, I could identify the men referred to by each use of the word “you” in the above monologue, delivered by the high-school student Anton Gatewood to his teacher Noah Solloway and Noah’s former romantic rival Cole Lockhart. But would it really even matter? Watching the actor Christopher Meyer say all this stuff from the back seat of a car to the two men in the front, his head swiveling back and forth as if he were watching some kind of bizarre, psychosexual Wimbledon, says it all. As an encapsulation of the chaos into which the titular relationship on “The Affair” plunged its various participants, Anton nails it. And judging from the cryptic flash-forwards that have opened each episode of Season 4 so far — in which Noah, Cole and Anton embark upon what appears to be a search for Alison Bailey — there’s more chaos to come.

But this particular brand of interpersonal mayhem takes a back seat to more immediate professional and physical concerns in this week’s episode, which returns us to the Los Angeles half of this season’s story. While Noah navigates the rocky waters of class, race and faculty politics at the charter school where he works, his ex-wife Helen and her boyfriend, Vic, receive a devastating medical diagnosis that throws their already strained relationship into greater turmoil. Connecting the two story lines is the sense that life is turmoil and chaos, and that the times we’re able to control it are happy accidents at best.

Savior complex: I reviewed tonight’s episode of The Affair for the New York Times.

Coincidence, synchronicity, luck of the draw: If any show on television is aware that these mysterious forces are often less than benign, it’s “The Affair.” The series’s titular relationship began with what seemed like kismet between a frustrated father and a grieving mother, and it ended in a slow-motion crack-up of the families involved. In the process, Noah landed in prison for a death he didn’t cause, covering for both his current wife and his former one. And those are just the two most prominent instances among many.

Which brings us to tonight’s episode, in which the often traumatic experiences of undocumented immigrants plays a central role in the story — airing, it just so happens, on a week when it has played a central role in American life and politics.

True, the back story behind Cole’s second wife, Luisa, was planted when she first appeared on the show; Sarah Treem, the series’s co-creator and its sole showrunner, has long had an eye for the undercurrents in this country that can drag otherwise fully functional adults down. Indeed, another such riptide, the small-town drug epidemic made manifest by the Lockhart family’s coke-dealing side hustle, popped up again this week after many, many hours of screentime had elapsed since it last played a part.

Still, this week’s installment, written by Treem and directed with Atlantic Ocean coolness by Rodrigo García, brings home the difficulties faced by America’s 11 million undocumented immigrants by tying it to quotidian and universal events. Let’s say you aren’t an undocumented immigrant, or don’t know any personally: You’ve almost certainly experienced the stomach-dropping dread that comes with seeing the lights of a cop car in your rearview mirror. You’ve probably also at some point felt like the odd person out, prevented by circumstances beyond your control from truly fitting into the life of a person you love. And you’ve most likely wondered why people who are supposed to care about you are too tied up in their own petty concerns to treat your plight with the seriousness it deserves.

That’s Luisa’s story, told from Cole’s perspective over the course of a bad couple of days in their life. For those of us in the real world, the timing could not be better. (Or worse.)

I reviewed last week’s typically on-the-money episode of The Affair for the New York Times.

Does the series still work? Did it ever? Appropriately, that may depend on your perspective. There’s an old saw taken from therapists and their countless dramatized depictions that sums up the experience of watching “The Affair” quite neatly: “How does that make you feel?” And from its very first hour, when its multi-perspective template was established, this series has emphasized feeling, serving more as a vehicle for impressionism rather than for realism. The differences among its characters’ competing histories speak to a basic truth about the unreliability of memory, but some of them are probably too major to explain away as tricks of the mind. (I mean, two totally different people saved the same kid from choking to death all the way back in the pilot.) As such, I have long believed that the best way to process “The Affair” is as a portrait of those mindsets, not as an effort to reconstruct the truth.

Viewed from that perspective, all the sex, lies, self-destruction, screaming matches and occasional violent outbursts and murder mysteries are merely the screen on which the series projects its kaleidoscopic picture — a picture of the ways in which grief, guilt, lust, love, parenthood, couplehood, marriage, divorce, age, class and (especially) the limits of traditional gender roles replace reality, deep down inside us. And if you can accept that, then “The Affair” winds up looking like one of the smartest, most observant, most empathetic things on television — the most truly adult show since “Mad Men.” You just have to let yourself feel it.

So how does it feel? Not always great, but I don’t think it’s supposed to. Helen and (especially) Noah aren’t merely unreliable narrators in this episode, they’re also unpleasant ones. The series — and the actors Maura Tierney and Dominic West — isn’t afraid to make these people ugly, and to look ugly doing it. They pay the price every time a viewer or critic says, “Get your act together, Helen,” or, “Ugh, Noah is the worst.” But expecting otherwise treats that ugliness (to echo Helen) as if it were the show’s “fault” rather than its strength. That misses the point.

Because if you’ve reached adulthood without ever failing to get your act together or being the worst … well, bless your heart, because that sure doesn’t look like life from where I’m sitting. “The Affair” — angry, guilty, horny, and as restless as the ocean Fiona Apple sings about in the opening credits — does.

I’m excited to be covering The Affair, one of my favorite shows, for the New York Times this season, beginning with this review of the season premiere. Co-creator and showrunner Sarah Treem saw this review and said “I’ve never seen anyone articulate what I’m trying to do on this show as clearly,” so there’s that.