Maura Tierney Cast in Showtime Drama Pilot The Affair

According to Deadline, Maura Tierney (ER) has become the latest addition to Showtime pilot The Affair. The Emmy nominee is set to play Helen, a woman married to her college sweetheart of 17 years who discovers that he’s having an affair with a woman he thinks is his soul mate. Helen is said to go from “understanding to furious, from forgiving to vengeful” about the news of her husband’s infidelity, which has understandably rocked the very stable world she thought she was living in. Tierney joins a cast that includes Dominic West (The Wire) as her husband Noah, a high school history teacher, and Ruth Wilson (Luther) as Alison, a woman trying to recover from a recent tragedy.

The Affair, from playwright Sarah Treem and executive producer Hagai Levi (In Treatment), is one of two pilots in the running at Showtime, along with The Vatican, a contemporary thriller starring Kyle Chandler (Friday Night Lights) as the Archbishop of New York. The network bypassed the pilot process entirely with its most recent series pickup, psychological thriller Penny Dreadful, which is set to debut as early as spring 2014 with its eight-episode first season.

In addition to her role as Abby Lockhart on the long-running NBC medical drama, Tierney has appeared on the likes of The Good Wife, Rescue Me, and The Office, while also co-starring on the original Parenthood pilot before a breast cancer diagnosis forced her to drop out. She recently made her Broadway debut opposite Tom Hanks in Lucky Guy, a play written by the late Nora Ephron that closed early last month.

Does The Affair sound like a show that you would watch? Should it be picked up, which Showtime show would it make most sense to air with? Who else would you like to see join the cast, assuming that more major additions are in the cards for the pilot?