Want to watch something really scary? Want to see something on television that's practically guaranteed to keep you and your spouse awake, lying rigidly next to each other in bed and attentive to clues about whether anything wicked is lurking outside your peripheral vision?
Just start watching Showtime's series The Affair on Sunday nights. It's enough to scare the pants right back onto you.
Even when you're happily married, watching The Affair with your spouse sitting beside you is like watching an R-rated movie with your parents when you're a teenager.
It's not something you feel good about even if it can be used as a starting point for serious discussions about important issues afterward.
Let's just say The Affair doesn't exactly help you drift dreamily to sleep once you hit "off" on the remote. It lingers. It makes you itchy. You'll find yourself flipping the pillow over, searching for the cool side, and more or less spinning in the sheets like a rotisserie chicken and not — let me repeat this — not because it's erotically arousing.
What it arouses, at least in folks who consider themselves paired-off for life like pieces of Tupperware or the blades of scissors, is a good old-fashioned frisson — a shudder and the goose-bumps. It displays for us that while infidelity may have its treats, it always depends on a trick. Somebody gets left holding the bag, and that bag usually doesn't have any sweets in it.
That's why The Affair is the most frightening show on television.
Sure, American Horror Story grips your entrails and gets into your nightmares (and sends women, armed with tweezers, to check our chin hairs with magnifying mirrors), but The Affair makes you think that joining the circus might just be a really peaceful alternative to the usual domestic routine. After American Horror Story I sleep soundly.
It was also much easier to fall asleep after watching True Blood, where characters chewed each other's necks and wrists in search of sustenance, where manic apocalyptic marauders took the law into their own hands, and where the undead clashed with a variety of shape-shifting life forms.
The Affair is divided into conflicting perspectives offered by the two characters who, although both married to other people whom they seem to love and with whom they are still intricately and passionately involved, nevertheless embark on that clandestine relationship which gives the series its title. With its emphasis on the he said/she said split, the narrative in The Affair proceeds with a lurch and a stumble, unnervingly portraying the dissonant, clashing versions of the event from various viewpoints.
Exploring, as it does, both the allure and the terror of the unknown, as well suggesting that there's something potentially grotesque and monstrous beneath even the most familiar domestic and social costumes we wear, it forces you to take sides.
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Explore all your optionsPicture my husband and me, then, on Sunday evening, each with a cat on a lap, replete from a good dinner, finishing a nice glass of wine and ready to watch the show. So far, so good, right?
Dominic West appears on the screen. You'll remember him from playing McNulty on The Wire and as the only English actor never to slip into any kind of UK-accented twang ever (sorry, Charlie Hunnam from Sons of Anarchy — you're almost as good). But then Ruth Wilson shows up. You'll remember her from the BBC's 2006 adaptation of Jane Eyre, as well as from her convincing portrayal of a charming sociopath in the BBC crime drama Luther.
You just know there's going to be trouble. I scooch over to my husband, huddle down, and watch between my fingers as West and Wilson remove their masks. I can't watch and I can't look away.
Gina Barreca is an English professor at the University of Connecticut and a columnist for the Hartford Courant.