Digital Spy presents Remote Patrol - the weekly column from New York-based TV critic Bruce Fretts, taking a look at what's hot right now in US television.
Fretts is a veteran of both Entertainment Weekly and TV Guide Magazine, where he penned the wildly popular 'Cheers & Jeers' column for ten years.
Homeland and The Affair: Showtime's Hot Streak
It's mid-September, and I'm supposed to be excited about the broadcast nets' new fall lineups. But it feels like more of the same: a would-be dynamic duo of superhero shows (Gotham and The Flash) and another Shonda Rhimes melodrama (How to Get Away with Murder) are the only new series generating anything resembling buzz.
So I'm already looking forward to October, when the pay-cable channel Showtime will launch the season's most exciting new drama, The Affair, and relaunch what was once TV's most exciting new drama, Homeland. I've gotten sneak peeks at the first episodes of each, and suffice it to say they will keep up the momentum set in motion by the network's summer one-two punch of Ray Donovan and Masters of Sex.
Homeland returns on October 5 with a two-hour premiere, and while I've only seen the first half, it already feels like a brand new show. Brody (Damian Lewis) is - SPOILER ALERT, if you haven't finished watching season three! - dead and gone, and blessedly, so is the Brody Bunch. I do miss his wife, Jessica, played by the lovely Morena Baccarin, but the show is better off without their two troublesome teens.
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Carrie (Claire Danes) is back in the field - and on the sauce, which might not mix well with the meds she takes to control her bipolar disorder. Danes, on the other hand, seems to have controlled her tendency to overact, at least in the opener. Her kid is safely out of the picture, at home with Carrie's sis. It will surprise no-one that Carrie doesn't seem like she'll be a candidate for Mother of the Year anytime soon.
There's no word about Carrie's dad, but the criminally underrated actor who played him, James Rebhorn, passed away over the hiatus. So one wonders if his character might meet the same fate, and if that might send Carrie off the deep end.
Carrie's father figure, Saul Berenson (Mandy Patinkin, who oughta win an Emmy now that he no longer has to compete with Breaking Bad's Aaron Paul), is still very much around, thank goodness. And he's happily reconciled with his wife, played by Sarita Choudhury, who's matured into a deeply soulful actress in the 20-plus years since her sizzling screen debut opposite Denzel Washington in Mississippi Masala.
I won't spoil any details of the opening hour, except to say that Corey Stoll steals the show as a Middle Eastern embassy employee - and it's good to see him bald and beautiful again, like he was on House of Cards. I mean, I love him on The Strain, but his toupee is one of the scariest things on FX's viral vampire drama.
The only scary thing about The Affair, which debuts October 12, is how good it is, right from the start. It has a deceptively simple premise, not unlike ABC's failed infidelity drama Betrayal: It's about the havoc wreaked upon two families when a married novelist (The Wire's Dominic West, whose British accent now only slips through when he yells) cheats on his wife (Maura Tierney... oh, how I've loved Maura Tierney, ever since her NewsRadio days). His mistress is a waitress (Ruth Wilson, another Brit, although you wouldn't know it from her flawless American accent), who's unhappily married to a Montauk, Long Island working man (Joshua Jackson, who - sorry, Fringe fans - will always be Dawson's Creek's Pacey to me).
The Affair also shares quite a few traits with the terrific new Jessica Chastain-James McAvoy film The Disappearance of Eleanor Rigby: Them, including a he said/she said structure and the shattering death of a child. But the show, with its bifurcated flash-back, flash-forward format, reminds me more - in a good way - of 2014's other new TV masterpiece, True Detective.
You see, a crime has been committed, but we don't know by whom, or to whom. And we watch, tantalised, as police detectives interrogate West and Wilson's characters, hoping to find out more. And for me, like it seems to be for them, The Affair feels a lot like love at first sight.
