Sarah Treem should be sacked by Showtime!
Showrunners have been fired for much less than this piss poor writing.
shareI wish the Original would come back. I'm so curious as to what he had planned.
shareWait, isn't she the creator of The Affair?
shareCo creator I think
shareCo-creator with Hagai Levi. He left after season two. This season's mess was all on her.
"Lettin' the cat outta the bag is a whole lot easier 'n puttin' it back in." -- Will Rogers
He left much earlier actually. He left early on during the first season. It has all been her ever since.
Interview is from 2014
http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-4607929,00.html
Edited to add: Personally I think he left after ep4 during season 1. I feel there is a shift to a faster pace and a more commercial feel to it. Not sure how else to express it. To Sarah Treems defense she has pretty heavy hinted at constant network interference as to how the story should go so she might not be the only one to blame.
Thanks. I'm definitely late to The Affair party. I just started binge watching a couple of weeks ago and must have confused reading some posts here talking about the network not granting a fourth season and when Levi left. My bad. Sorry.
NOTE: It's showing Levi as Executive Producer through the end of season 1, then season 2 he disappears, and S02E01 was written by Treem, produced by Jeffrey Reiner. Same with S02E02.
"Lettin' the cat outta the bag is a whole lot easier 'n puttin' it back in." -- Will Rogers
I wish he would have stayed but I very much understand his reason. It shows his integrity towards what he is creating. He was there when they received the Golden Globe although he was no longer attached to the show. I thought that was nice.
From other interviews it sounds like he and Sarah Treem have a personal friendship and even later on he would never say a bad word about the show or the writing just how the production is run which points more towards the network.
Too bad really, it could have been such a fantastic show.
I think he left mid season two
shareIt can certainly lead to a show's inconsistency that's for sure.
"Lettin' the cat outta the bag is a whole lot easier 'n puttin' it back in." -- Will Rogers
No, he left early season 1. He's Israeli and has made no bones about not wanting to do commercial work, and of course, that's not how American Television works. He'd rather have more freedom in a small Israeli market than be harnessed by a big cable channel with expectations.
He and Sarah have worked together and are very good friends. She probably kept him a bit grounded, and he's super creative but doesn't care if the audience likes his work or not.
Damn right we're snowflakes! Winter is coming!
I believe in the trivia it says mid season two. There's nothing in the article provided that suggests any real end date.
shareGood find. Exactly.
(From the Trivia section):
"The series was co-created by Hagai Levi and Sarah Treem. However, Levi retired from writing the series during the second season. His stated reason was that the show was moving away from what he had envisioned. Treem was therefore "the best person" to author the show from that point on."
"Lettin' the cat outta the bag is a whole lot easier 'n puttin' it back in." -- Will Rogers
Trivia is user entered. It's not reliable. There are tons of articles and interviews written in the same year the show first aired that make it clear he decided to leave early season one:
When production of the show got into high gear, Levi realized that his vision for the show was changing before his very eyes and decided to leave and return to Israel to put his energy into the Israeli show “Cursed” on the HOT network.
http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-4607929,00.html
I think they mean "Accursed" which he worked on in 2014.
This doesn't talk about his departure, but it's interesting:
Sarah Treem: I am a big believer in format. Hagai thinks of himself as not so much as a writer but more as like a creator, an inventor of television formats. He”s not quite as interested in the minutiae of what happens every episode. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2699110/
Damn right we're snowflakes! Winter is coming!
share
Thank you for that interesting interview. I definitely feel the tension between the Arthouse and Network pull of the series as they introduced yet another "whodunit?" and even a Columbo style "we know who dunit." In fairness, writers have to take risks to expand an initial idea and the downside can mean falling short. Gunther talking about the unreliability of memory was too self consciously meta and characters fighting with phantoms rarely works, in my opinion.
However, expanding the characters has been worthwhile, once I got past my prejudice against the French on screen. The scene where hope is slowly crushed during the Alzheimer lucidity episode was beautifully played and directed and that is always the show's great asset. They just need to cut the Sam Spade for five minutes.