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The Affair

Last year, The Affair stunned everyone when it won two Golden Globes. One of those was for Best Television Series – Drama and the other honored leading lady Ruth Wilson‘s incandescent work on the show. This year, however, the show was shut out for a nomination in every category except one: Maura Tierney was nominated for her work as a supporting actress on the show.

Even though I’m a massive fan, I can sort of understand why the ever-fickle Hollywood Foreign Press Association might have snubbed The Affair‘s gorgeous second season. The show meddled with its trend-setting formula; Instead of pivoting back and forth between just Noah and Alison’s points of view, it added Cole and Helen’s perspectives and began to play with the concept of time. This made the show feel more and more like an expansive and experimental visual novel and less like an easily digestible weekly television series. Still, it’s fitting that the HFPA decided to honor Tierney as she is not only the show’s emotional anchor this season, but as an actress she pulls off the work of a magician.

Yes, that stoned woman drunkenly running through the streets of Brooklyn with foil in her hair is the emotional anchor of one of the best shows on television. As The Affair became more and more interested in exploring stranger locations, darker story lines, and deconstructing Alison and Noah from the outside in, it needed one character to ground us. Helen was the one who couldn’t “fuck up.” She had to keep the family together. She had to keep herself sane.

In season one, we only saw Helen through the eyes of her unhappy husband and his mistress. She is either a cold, unsupportive shrew, a snobbish rich girl, or a devastated victim begging for her husband back. This season, she is a glorious reflection of the demands made upon the modern woman to be chic, nurturing, wise, and still sexy in the face of turmoil. Inevitably the pressure that builds inside bubbles over. Where other actresses might not have fully committed to Helen’s moments of basest degradation or sheer decline, Tierney chows into them and gives them an earthy, honest beauty. In moments that could otherwise be played for laughs, Tierney’s emotional courage pulls us into the panic and embarrassment that Helen so keenly feels.

Maura Tierney’s career has been defined by a rather understated majesty. Whether she’s doing comedy or drama, she has the oddly spellbinding ability to make loud and crazy emotions seem not only commonplace, but subdued. She doesn’t ever give in to histrionic displays, but rather she lets everything she’s thinking and feeling flit across her face with the slightest of telling twitches. And this is where she deeply understands the mission of acting: it’s not a performance so much as an expression of truth. We keep most of our heartache, passion, humor, judgment, and sorrow tied down under the surface. Tierney knows how to do this while still communicating everything rumbling within.

That’s the magic trick. That’s the skill of “holding the mirror up to nature.” Tierney is one of the only actors working today who knows not only how to carefully put together the complex puzzle of a character, but how to take it apart and look at it from different angles. This rare gift soars in the context of a show like The Affair even as Tierney always seems so gorgeously down-to-earth.

[Watch The Affair on Showtime] or [Watch The Affair on Hulu]