Matt Bomer and Jonathan Bailey make a love affair across four decades that is frank, grown-up and often moving. Around it, Ron Nyswaner’s series marches through every landmark of American gay history as if taking attendance, and the romance has to wait.
Ron Nyswaner’s eight-part adaptation of Thomas Mallon’s novel takes a love affair that begins in Washington in 1952 and follows it, in jumps, to 1986. The men are Hawkins Fuller, a State Department official who has never been caught at anything, and Tim Laughlin, a young Catholic who arrives in the capital believing in Joe McCarthy and in God, in roughly that order. The verdict is simple. When the two of them are alone together, Fellow Travelers is as good as this kind of drama gets. When it cuts away to show us what else was happening in America, it slackens, and it cuts away a great deal.
Matt Bomer plays Hawk as a man who has decided in advance what each of his expressions will be. The smile arrives half a second after the eyes, and that half-second is the performance: it tells us what he costs himself every time he is charming. Jonathan Bailey’s Tim is the opposite, open to the point of recklessness, a boy who prays before and after and tells the truth in the office when a lie would have been wiser. Bailey has a way of looking at Bomer as if he has just been handed something he cannot afford, and it is the look the whole series rests on. Of the two it is Bailey who moved us, because Tim is the one who keeps paying.
The sex scenes have had most of the attention and they deserve it, for the plain reason that they are where the writing is sharpest. Nyswaner uses them to show who is in charge, and the answer changes. In the first episodes Hawk gives instructions and Tim obeys, and both of them know this is about more than the bedroom; by the 1970s the arrangement is not what it was. Nothing in the dialogue states this and nothing needs to. We were struck by how rarely television lets a sex scene carry information, and by how much these carry.
Daniel Minahan is one of four directors, and the Washington the series sets up is a place of flat, bright offices and dim red bars. Joseph La Corte’s costumes do a good deal of the work: Hawk in grey flannel that fits him like a uniform, Tim in a suit that looks new for the interview and never quite worn in, Lucy Smith in the full skirts of a senator’s daughter dressed by her mother. Paul Leonard-Morgan’s score is mostly piano, quiet under the love scenes, and for the first half it stays out of the way. In the later decades it is asked to tell us the weight of history, and it begins to lean.
Here is the trouble. Each episode is pinned to a landmark of its decade, from the McCarthy hearings onwards. The affair is made to walk through all of them, and the series stops to make sure we have noticed where we are. Marcus Gaines (Jelani Alladin), a Black journalist, and Frankie Hines (Noah J. Ricketts), a performer at the bar where the men drink, are given a strand of their own that is set down whenever Hawk and Tim need the screen back, and both actors are too good for the scraps. Allison Williams is sharp and sad as Lucy, who is written largely as a problem for Hawk to manage rather than a woman with her own evenings. Erin Neufer’s Mary Johnson, a colleague at State with a secret of her own, is the quietest and best-used of the minor characters. In the middle episodes we found ourselves impatient for the men to be left alone, and then annoyed at being made to feel it.
Nyswaner’s strengths and his weaknesses are both on show. He writes a sickroom better than almost anyone, and he cannot resist a speech. Will Brill’s Roy Cohn is a sly, sweating, funny creation, and the series could have used more of him and fewer dates on the screen.
The last two episodes, back in the 1980s, repay the slower middle, and the hospital scenes did more to us than we expected from a series that had spent so long telling us what to think. Watch it in pairs of episodes, with patience, and with someone who will not mind if you go quiet. The best of its eight hours are in the bedroom and at the bedside, and that is not a complaint.
