Photo: Nina Salpeter

Showtime’s The Affair returns to Montauk for its final season, to a preview decktop screening at Gurney’s. With the drizzle and ocean breezes, fans felt right at home with the first episode: Helen (the remarkable Maura Tierney) ministers to both the death of Vic (Omar Metwally) and the birth of his son, Ed. Noah (a quizzical Dominic West) lends a helping hand. And in mini segments Noah discusses the film of his roman-a-clef, Descent, with its star; Joanie Lockheart (Anna Paquin), at a moment in the future, deals with family and missing her mother and father. The question is, do we miss them too?

Gone are Ruth Wilson as Alison, and Joshua Jackson as Cole. The actors chose to leave the show. But Noah and Helen and their family remain to remind us of “the affair,” and its dire consequences. Attending the preview, sponsored by Showtime and the Hamptons International Film Festival, were the writer Katie Robbins, a recruit to the creative team a season ago, and Julia Goldani Telles who plays Whitney, Noah and Helen’s daughter, excellent at acting out. In the new season, Whitney is about to marry her age appropriate boyfriend after a relationship with an art dealer, decades her senior. Clad in a black and white striped cashmere sweater with “time’s up” embroidered in red, the signature style of Lingua Franca, Goldani Telles spoke eloquently about the show’s glimpse of the difficulties of marriage, even though, as she pointed out, she is only 24.

Can the show survive the losses? Funerals do bring out the worst. But judging from its season debut, all looks promising for the end of The Affair’s high concept drama, with only a suggestion that some satiric moments—Helen’s mother’s (Kathleen Chalfant) outbursts, for example, or scenes of a new age home birth—may just be unintentionally hilarious.