It’s grimly fitting that last night’s episode of The Affair took place on Thanksgiving, because it was all about the consequences of shitting where you eat—not for you, necessarily, but for your fellow diners. After another significant leap forward in time, we rejoin the merry band of Baileys, Lockharts, and Solloways after Noah’s (Dominic West) book Descent has made him the toast of the town, and a pretty penny to boot. But while he’s living large, the people whose marriage he helped break up are paying the price. Cole Lockhart (Joshua Jackson), as you’ll see below, is facing the fallout from the ugly family history Noah dredged up in his novel, with a little help from family nemesis Oscar Hodges. And Alison (Ruth Wilson), whose POV comprises the episode’s first half, is struggling with a new life of luxury in which she has been reduced to a prop, or a PR ploy. Noah’s feast is their famine.

Meghan O’Keefe and I reviewed last night’s episode of The Affair for Decider.

It’s been fascinating to watch The Affair tell Helen’s story this season. Both the writing (this time around from playwright and consulting producer David Henry Hwang) and acting (from Tierney, a series MVP) has examined her unique blend of drives, strengths, and foibles with surgical precision, from her rebound relationship with Max to her making-up-for-lost-time use of intoxicants to her struggle to parent both her children and her own mother on her own. Sadder, wiser, and wounded by the series’ main characters in a way it has the guts to show may not properly heal—a chronic condition, like Martin’s Crohn’s disease—she’s a fully realized, incredibly compelling creation.

Meghan O’Keefe and I reviewed this week’s The Affair for Decider.

“People don’t see me, Cole. They don’t. They just wanna fuck me, or they don’t…see me. They don’t care. Sometimes I worry at night that I’m not a real person, that I’m just a figment of other people’s imaginations.” In this week’s episode of The Affair, Alison (Ruth Wilson) self-diagnosed her core self-esteem issue with a level of insight you’d usually get charged by the hour for. That she offers this analysis not in her own POV segment, but in her estranged husband Cole’s, is largely immaterial. Okay, maybe it’s proof that Cole knows her better than just about anyone, since this entirely accurate appraisal is his memory’s construction of their conversation. But it also demonstrates that Cole sees her as a woman in need of rescue…which is her point exactly. She’s always a character in someone else’s story, while her own gets pushed to the wayside.

Meghan O’Keefe and I reviewed the latest episode of The Affair, which (if you ask me anyway) remains excellent, for Decider.

If you had to sum up the Tao of The Affair—what it is, what it does, how it does it—in two lines of dialogue, this week’s beautiful car wreck of an episode has you covered with Helen (Maura Tierney) alone. In her half of the episode, which leads the hour, she puts a punctuation mark at the end of her humiliating arrest for DWI and marijuana possession by asking Noah (Dominic West), the man she feels drove her to this point, “Why are you doing this to us?” At the same point in Noah’s side of the story, she instead says “Why do you get to fuck up and I don’t?” Right there you have the yin and yang, the presence and absence, of Helen’s dilemma. Noah’s infidelity and their subsequent divorce have devastated her by forcing her and her children to suffer the consequences of someone else’s actions, yes; that’s the explanation she allows herself to articulate. But they’ve also hurt her by forcing her to confront how much she wishes she could get away with that kind of tomfoolery, too. Showing us every side of the gender-specific resentments and self-perceived virtues of men and women, fathers and mothers, husbands and wives—even the sides the people in question don’t wish to show, or can’t see themselves—is The Affair’s specialty and strength.

Meghan O’Keefe and I reviewed this week’s The Affair for Decider. I think this show is excellent, and I’ll level with you: I think the writing we’re doing on it is second to none.

It’s episodes like this that make The Affair the smartest show about relationships on television. Nothing is as explicit or unflinching about the ways grief and memory can remain so present they’re practically a third partner. Nothing is as honest about the power and the limitations of sexual connection. Nothing is as observant about how we identify the comforting, satisfying elements of love, then lie and hide and self-censor to preserve them, all but guaranteeing their eventual loss.

Meghan O’Keefe and I reviewed last night’s The Affair for Decider. This is an excellent show.

And what about Noah? His return from Manhattan is a far cry from the sweet, slow-dancing with no music Nicholas Sparks routine his POV depicted last week. He’s irritable and exhausted at the end of a long and shitty day, nosing around about the money they stand to make from the sale of her house, furious for incoherent reasons that she took a job with Robert and Yvonne. He storms out onto the deck, then — with the camera lingering on Alison’s face until the end to make his reappearance feel all the more sweeping and sudden — returns, all apologies and animal lust. What follows is a stand-up tabletop sex scene that’s hot even by Affair standards, as Noah tells her “I just want you to be happy” over and over: Seriously, my notes include the words (copying and pasting here) “lorrrrrrrrrrrrd have mercy” and “WHOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO.” I fanned myself like a Southern lady, for real.

Given that this is the kind of sex you gchat your friends about afterwards, something about Noah’s anger and subsequent remorse is clearly clicking with Alison. Is she appreciative of his ability to recognize and admit his mistakes? Is she getting off on keeping Cole’s visit a secret down to the last detail (he rifled through Noah’s manuscript and fixed their toilet, facts she not only hides but actively lies about) even as her boyfriend begs for forgiveness for his comparatively less severe wrongdoing? And how does this fit with the flashforward, in which she discovers she’s the last to know that her husband’s attorney was hired and paid for by his ex-wife?

I don’t have the answers, but I’m not sure I’m supposed to. Maybe it was the weird symmetry between Alison’s POV and Cole’s later in the episode—car rides with older men, seemingly superfluous conversations with a cafe waitress, camerawork in which a character approaches and embraces them suddenly from outside the frame — but the deeper we go into this show, the more I suspect the dueling POVs are more like the opposite sides of a Rorschach blot. The shape is there for all to see, but the meaning’s what we make of it.

Meghan O’Keefe and I tag-team reviewed the latest episode of The Affair, which I think is just tremendous, for Decider.

The only place Helen finds comfort that isn’t weed-scented is her kids. Wearing a lived-in t-shirt that makes her look physically as well as emotionally at ease, she turns their glum family dinner around with a self-deprecating quip or two; she seems at home, in other words. Strangely, the only other moment she truly comes across as satisfied she’s doing the right thing is when, in the flash-forward, she goes to the jailhouse to pay for Noah’s lawyer. The implication may well be that this reflects her own self-interest, that she knows more about Scotty’s death than we’ve ever suspected. But could it also indicate her self-conception as a woman far more at ease with being selfless than with being selfish? Isn’t this — the different yet equally self-defeating forms of martyr virtue men and women allow themselves to embody — what The Affair is really all about?

My fellow critic Meghan O’Keefe and I will be tag-team reviewing The Affair, one of my favorite shows, for Decider this season—she’ll handle the men’s points of view and I’ll be examining the women’s. We started with last night’s season premiere.

My love for The Affair is passionate and tempestuous and closely guarded, an embarrassingly thematically-appropriate way to love The Affair. It’s the show I’m most likely to tweet about rhapsodically at two in the morning after a few drinks, marveling at its sharp sexiness and sophistication as if I’m impetuously blurting out a secret to my fellow night-owls and barflies. These tweets are often shot through with bafflement and contempt for the show’s detractors: Why, goddammit why, does no one love The Affair like I do?Don’t they know how good they could have it? I feel like I’ve discovered the best thing in the world and it’s a thing only I can see.

Which is an exaggeration, of course, but only slightly. Even many of the show’s initial, vocal supporters appear to have cooled on the bifurcated saga of Noah Holloway and Alison Lockhart; on HitFix’s annual critics’ poll it ranked a lowly 24th, below such scintillating fare as The Walking Dead, Gotham, and season four of Homeland. At moments like this, I worry that TV criticism’s sensible refusal to conflate “serious” with good may have become a reflexive zeal to conflate “serious” with “bad.”

But the worry is slight compared to my deep, deep delight in the show itself, which is one of the best on television. It’s just so smart, and so specific, about so many things that are hard for TV to do without getting all, you know, teevee about them.

The season finale of The Affair aired last night, so me and my fellow critic Eric Thurm got all he-said/he-said about it and debated the show for the New York Observer.

I talked about the season finales of Homeland and The Affair and the penultimate episode of The Comeback on HuffPost Live’s Spoiler Alert show today. Watch it here!

I’ll be talking about the Newsroom finale, The Comeback, The Affair, and Homeland on @huffpostlive at 5:30pm—tune in: http://huff.lv/1DhCjt6

I’ll be talking The Comeback, The Newsroom, The Affair, and Homeland on @HuffPostLive today at 5pm. Tune in here!

I’ll be talking The Newsroom, The Comeback, The Affair, and Homeland on @HuffPostLive at 4:50pm. Tune in here!

I’ll be talking the Boardwalk Empire finale, Homeland, & The Affair on @HuffPostLive today at 4:55pm. Watch it here.

I’ll be talking The Affair, Boardwalk Empire, and Homeland on HuffPost Live’s Spoiler Alert at 5pm today. Turn on tune in!