Good Sex Can’t Save Fellow Travelers

I should start by acknowledging that the sex scenes in Fellow Travelers are, indeed, very hot — not in the usual, politely deferential way you see gay sex in TV and movies, where the camera pans away to an open window or treats the bodies in action as sculptural objects. These are lived-in, character-revealing and -defining sequences. The series’ two main figures, a D.C. fixer named Hawkins Fuller (played by Matt Bomer) and a younger aspiring staffer named Tim Laughlin (played by Jonathan Bailey), meet at the beginning of the McCarthy era and become physically and, later, emotionally entwined just as anti-Communist fervor kicks the Lavender Scare into high gear. Hawkins, the more experienced of the two, cruises for men in parks and ignores them in the halls of government buildings afterward. Tim, whom Hawkins quickly nicknames “Skippy,” is less experienced but knows how to use his prettiness to his advantage. In one deft scene, he plays the sub to Hawkins’s top in order to get his lover to take him to an exclusive party full of political power players. The show gets that sex, for these men, is at once a risk, a venue for gamesmanship, and a totally natural need. It’s a thing that intersects with all the other aspects of their characters, excluding them from state power and uniting them as a couple at the same time.

It might seem crass to start a review by talking about the sex, but it’s at the fore of Fellow Travelers’ marketing and also the thing that’s most exceptional about the otherwise faltering Showtime limited series. The show is based on a 2007 novel by Thomas Mallon that focused on gay men in ’50s-era D.C., but it has been adapted for TV by Ron Nyswaner, screenwriter of Philadelphia, and expanded into a decades-spanning epic. The frame story takes place during the early years of the AIDS epidemic, with the narrative stopping off in a hedonistic ’70s Fire Island and Harvey Milk’s San Francisco. In the early episodes, as Tim and Hawkins meet and negotiate the McCarthy era, the series tends to be sharp and often darkly funny, but it loses definition and risks becoming maudlin as its characters get lost in Gay U.S. History 101. (Nyswaner originally intended to adapt the book as a feature film, always a red flag with TV series.) That didacticism is present in parts of the earlier episodes of Fellow Travelers, too, and is at odds with the series’ thornier, more compelling character-driven storytelling. Fellow Travelers can’t seem to decide if it wants to be a history lesson or a human-scale story, and too often it falls into the trap of the former.

Bomer and Bailey do their best to lend depth to Hawkins and Tim, and when they have the opportunity to, sketch out conflicted portraits of mid-century men. Bomer excels at playing a square jaw with secrets, a character who keeps everything at reserve, blocking even his own emotions from himself. Hawkins believes his cred as a WWII hero will protect him from speculation about his sexuality, which interlocks well with Bomer’s own persona — he’s a guy with matinee idol looks who was presumed straight through his time on White Collar until he publicly came out later. Bomer, in his performance, understands the armor that kind of masculine beauty can provide, straightening his posture in scenes where Hawkins is passing, then shifting to the hauteur of a top (and yes, there is a lot of discussion of him being a top) on the hunt while safe in queer company.

Bailey, by contrast, puts all of Tim’s conflict on the surface — he’s worse at playing the game than Hawkins, but better at seeing how unjust the game is itself. His character’s been raised Catholic and, despite having already had a few gay encounters, wants to maintain a connection to his faith. In Fellow Travelers’s earlier episodes, as Roy Cohn (an amazingly sleazy Will Brill) and Joe McCarthy (Chris Bauer, grimly toxic) rise to power, the pressures of the Washington witch hunt twist Hawkins and Tim toward and against each other. At its best, the show explores the willful ignorance and doublethink that queer men like Hawkins and Tim adopt to survive and how freely they tend to cut loose people less protected than themselves, such as a lesbian couple Tim briefly befriends. The messier and more contradictory Nyswaner lets these characters be, the more real they become.

Unfortunately, Fellow Travelers drifts in the opposite direction, toward smoothness and bland palatability. Alongside Tim and Hawkins, the show introduces a secondary storyline about two Black men, following Marcus (Jelani Alladin), a reporter friend of Hawkins, and Frankie (Noah J. Ricketts), a femme drag performer. Fellow Travelers clearly wants to underline the fact that Black queer men’s experiences are distinct from their white counterparts’, but the writing for Marcus and Frankie rarely gives them space to do anything other than reiterate that point. It’s a respectful-to-the-point-of-patronizing dynamic that’s similar to the storylines given to Black characters in other American historical dramas centered on white characters, like Julia or The Gilded Age. Alladin and Ricketts are capable performers but don’t get the kind of material that Bomer and Bailey do — and certainly not the same kinds of sex scenes. Allison Williams, meanwhile, plays Hawkins’s well-bred beard, the show slowly unraveling the extent to which she’s aware of his predilections. It’s a part that’s rich with meta-text — I do imagine that if Marnie from Girls lived in the 1950s, she would have ended up married to a gay man — but Williams has little to play other than simmering resentment and is especially underserved by the layers of prosthetics and wigs applied as Fellow Travelers moves through the decades. There’s something camp in seeing her tell her daughter she can’t possibly pretend to understand her husband while done up with gray hair and ’80s statement jewelry, but it’s not especially moving.

Even Fellow Travelers’s main characters fall prey to a similar flattening. Perhaps because Nyswaner is expanding from the original novel, his grip on the characters slackens after the McCarthy years. The series skips among timelines, but the first four episodes, which tend to stay in the 1950s, are more taut than the wandering back half. Tim’s transformation from repressed Catholic to San Francisco activist doesn’t quite track on a character level; Hawkins’s experience as an emotionally shut-down husband is more clearly drafted but too slowly paced. The scenes set in the AIDS era echo other epoch-defining works, like The Normal Heart (which after all, starred Matt Bomer) and Angels in America, but in their shadow, Fellow Travelers struggles to make its own impression. As with so many of the show’s missteps, you can see how it ended up here. Sure, it’s worthwhile to talk about the horrors of the epidemic, the government’s failure to intervene, and how closeted gay men in politics were culpable, but the pile-up of good intentions overwhelms the characters’ sense of humanity. Hawkins and Tim are more interesting when they’re less symbolic, when they’re selfish and calculating and self-destructive and, yes, also very horny.