Maura Tierney and Dominic West in The Affair

Showtime’s The Affair has proven that it takes two to tango (i.e., cheat on your spouse) and to tell very different versions of the events before and after said adultery. The angle is that it has multiple angles from which it tells the story of the affair between Noah (Dominic West) and Alison (Ruth Wilson). To the show’s credit, season one didn’t suffer from jumping between the two perspectives, even if the finale featured more disparate recollections than ever before.


The second season of The Affair will double down on this Rashomon-like storytelling and allow for Noah and Alison’s spouses to share their tales, too. Yahoo! reports (via The Associated Press) that we’ll get to witness the aftermath of the affair from the perspectives of wronged spouses Cole (Joshua Jackson) and Helen (Maura Tierney). There won’t be some awful four-way split screen, though; each episode will still feature two sides of the story, but they’ll change from week to week.

Cole and Helen’s inclusion in the storytelling isn’t meant to provide clarification or lend weight to Noah or Alison’s versions of the events, though. Creator Sarah Treem already told the AP that the decision wasn’t made to “make sure that everybody understands it perfectly,” and that the additional voices won’t necessarily help suss out the truth. You can look forward to being enlightened or further befuddled when The Affair returns on October 4.