This middling midlife relationship drama introduces us early on to the formula devised by the American sexologist Jack Morin that “attraction plus obstacle equals excitement”. Here, the frisson is between working-class fitness trainer Beth (Romola Garai) and the more comfortably off GP Tom (Dominic Cooper), with the obstacle being that they’re both married to other people.
As for the excitement, that takes a while to arrive. But once writer Danny Brocklehurst (Fool Me Once, Brassic) has assembled his key ingredients of disillusionment and extramarital flirtation, he does eventually bring the mixture to the boil, with Beth and Tom stealing away every five minutes to hook up. It’s the flip side of Dr Seuss’s Green Eggs and Ham: they’d do it in a car, they’d do it in a lake, in any kind of weather and against a kitchen dresser.
Which makes Adultery sound considerably more vigorous than it really is. On the plus side, it’s refreshing to see a primetime ITV1 drama that doesn’t feel the need to litter the screen with dead bodies and crime-scene tape. Yet this exploration of infidelity, set in the North West, still feels overly familiar.
Illicit TV affairs tend to follow a route map, and this six-parter doesn’t take many diversions. We witness the temptation, the crossing of a line, the double life, the guilt, the attempts to call it off, the smartphone equivalent of a paper trail and, ultimately, the exposure. Is there anything here that couldn’t have been lifted from any number of soap storylines in which characters have risked blowing their settled lives to bits?
Not really, though the contemporary setting offers some opportunity to explore our culture of omnipresent surveillance, such as the tracking apps that monitor our movements and the cloud services that preserve our images like digital flies in amber. Deceit, it seems, is far more difficult when our lives are tagged by tech.
Beth, at least, has genuine emotional weight. Her energies have been sapped by mortgage payments and parenting crises, leaving her without the zest for life she once possessed. So, the death of her best friend hits like a thunderclap, the grief prompting her to escape a marriage that’s grown stagnant.
But those around her feel sketched in pencil rather than indelible ink. Husband Neil (Matthew McNulty) is rarely allowed to be anything more than negligent and crass, while Tom soon becomes consumed by self-recrimination, admitting that he hates the man the affair has made him. Development for Tom’s wife Hannah (Shelley Conn) also comes too late in the day for us to fully invest in the darkness beneath her smiling, comfortable façade.
Brocklehurst refrains from passing moral judgement on any of them, but makes clear how class, inherited beliefs and insecurity have constrained them all. There is hope, though, to be found in the younger generation.
Beth and Tom initially find themselves in each other’s orbit because their teenage children are in a relationship of their own. And the actions and mindset of Beth’s son Ollie (Johnny Sanpher) and Tom’s daughter Jess (Leila Khan) appear to suggest that a more open-minded, compassionate future may be possible for them, even if it’s likely to remain a struggle for their parents.
By the final episode, Morin’s equation about attraction and excitement has come full circle, though the obstacle isn’t as insurmountable as it initially seemed. But at what cost? Those who have stuck it out will find plenty to chew over, though there’s little here that’s meatier than the tearful reckonings that follow a standard soapland showdown.
Adultery is available to watch in full on ITVX and STV Player. It continues on ITV1 and STV at 9pm on Monday 26 October.
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