PopHampton: Start Your Summer with a Marvel-ous Affair
It’s almost summer, so you know what that means—it’s time to catch up on all the TV you missed and find some new summer shows!
Montauk-set Showtime series The Affair returns for its fifth and final season soon, and from the looks of things, the show will continue to defy expectations and go in interesting new directions. At the end of the show’s fourth season, Alison (Ruth Wilson) was murdered by new beau Ben (Ramon Rodriguez), who made it look like the troubled woman had committed suicide.
Perhaps by design, the final season will have many changes. Wilson, along with co-star Joshua Jackson (who plays Alison’s ex-husband Cole), are both out, though Jackson may appear as a guest star. Anna Paquin joins the cast in a flash-forward storyline as Joanie, the grown daughter of Cole and Alison, who returns to Montauk decades after Alison’s death to discover the truth about what happened to her mother.
After four seasons of intense and unpredictable storytelling, it’s not all that surprising that the show is jumping ahead. After all, The Affair randomly focused much of its third season on a French college professor named Juliette (Irene Jacob), followed her all the way back to Paris, devoted the season finale to her and then never mentioned her again. So it’s not at all shocking that its final tale will involve yet another newcomer.
Especially intriguing is that Paquin’s story will apparently be set in a climate change-ravaged version of Montauk. We can’t wait to see how the show conveys that! Will the Lobster Roll still be standing? We sure hope so, considering how much drama has unfolded there over four seasons. Ok, we actually know it will still be there, but don’t tell anyone.
The Hamptons have always been home to fabulous writers, and prolific TV writer and producer Amy Sherman-Palladino recently purchased a home in East Hampton with her husband, Daniel Palladino. Sherman-Palladino has created TV series such as Gilmore Girls, Bunheads and most recently, the highly successful The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel on Amazon Prime. Known for her snappy, pop-culture laced dialogue and funny, flawed female characters, Sherman-Palladino originally came to prominence writing for various sitcoms, including Roseanne and Veronica’s Closet before creating Gilmore Girls, which ran for seven seasons from 2000–2007 and was revived as a special Netflix limited series in 2016.
Gilmore Girls told the story of a young mom and her teenage daughter who lived in a quaint Connecticut village filled with quirky characters. Bunheads, which ran for one (delightful) season in 2012, was about a Las Vegas showgirl who moves to a small California town and finds herself teaching ballet to a group of teens. The show was partially inspired by Sherman-Palladino’s own history as a dancer.
While the series, which starred Broadway actress Sutton Foster (who is now the star of Younger), was critically acclaimed, it didn’t hit for viewers. The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel is about a 1950s housewife who, after being left by her husband, discovers her gift for stand-up comedy. All of Sherman-Palladino’s shows have a great sense of community to them, with colorful supporting casts. Perhaps in the future, she’ll set a show in the Hamptons!
Marvel’s Avengers series, which has a long history of featuring East Enders, including recently engaged Scarlett Johansson, Gwyneth Paltrow and Robert Downey Jr., recently blew box office records out of the water with Avengers: Endgame. Paltrow and Downey are reportedly done with the franchise, but Johansson is expected to star in a solo film about her Black Widow character (despite the character’s sad fate in Endgame). It’s about time—Johansson has appeared as the character in seven Marvel films so far.
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