Showtime debuts ‘Fellow Travelers’
Set in the 1950s on Capitol Hill during the McCarthy era, “Fellow Travelers” (9 p.m., Sunday, Showtime, TV-MA) adapts the 2007 novel by Thomas Mallon about how the witch hunt to rid the government of homosexual “deviants” ruined the careers and lives of many talented men and women and came between the story’s main protagonists.
Matt Bomer (“Chuck,” “White Collar”) stars as Hawkins Fuller, a wounded war hero and impossibly good-looking staffer for liberal Sen. Wesley Smith (Linus Roache). While Smith assumes that Hawkins is destined to marry his daughter Lucy (Allison Williams, “Girls”), he is really a deeply closeted gay man who finds fleeting, furtive and anonymous trysts in the city’s gay demimonde. Until he begins to enjoy the company of Tim (Jonathan Bailey), an idealistic young man and deeply conflicted Catholic, newly arrived in Washington.
Hawkins arranges for
Tim to get a job in the offices of the red-baiting Sen. Joe McCarthy (Chris Bauer), all but run by his counsel Roy Cohn (Will Brill), who hires a protege of his own, David Schine (Matt Visser), a very handsome heir to a hotel fortune. It only slowly dawns on Tim that he’s been hired as a spy.
“Travelers” doesn’t shy away from wading deep into the details and complexities of its time, its seeming contradictions as well as echoes of our current era.
While the McCarthy witch hunts traded in the homophobia of the day, it was widely rumored that Cohn’s interest in Schine was about more than their shared antiCommunism. And the series trades in tales that Sen. McCarthy was more than a bit “handsy” with male staffers.
The action bounces back and forth in time between the McCarthy era and the mid-1980s, when Hawkins, just a bit grayer, has become a prosperous family man and an established diplomat. He has clearly grown estranged from Tim, even as he hears through the grapevine that his old friend and lover is dying from AIDS. The deals and betrayals that separate the three decades (and divided the two men) is the story that unfolds.
Impressively produced, “Travelers” may remind some of a “Mad Men” for the McCarthy era, substituting mid-century Washington for Madison Avenue. But unlike that AMC production, it includes extensive and rather explicit sexual content that may be too much for some.
The fact that Hawkins’ life in the closet has inspired him to deal in sex from a violently dominating and dismissive attitude may be true to his character and to his time, but it’s still pretty rough stuff, which may be more than distracting for many.
› “The Gilded Age” (9 p.m. Sunday, HBO, TV-MA) returns for a second season. Set in Manhattan in the late 19th century, the time when robber barons and newly minted fortunes upset the social order of knickerbocker New York, “Gilded” is written and created by Julian Fellowes (“Downton Abbey”).
Bertha Russell (Carrie Coons), buttressed by her husband George’s (Morgan Spector) new fortune, seems more confident in her station and is trying to establish a new Metropolitan Opera to rival the Academy of Music, championed by the old-money crowd.
As in season one, much of the action concerns their more established neighbors, Ada and Agnes Brook (Cynthia Nixon and Christine Baranski), heirs to old Dutch families, who have taken in their penniless niece Marian (Louisa Jacobsen) and her friend Peggy, an ambitious Black woman from a proud and accomplished family, who works as Agnes’ secretary.
The social climbing, schemes and historical details seem interesting enough. The costumes and sets are gorgeous, and the production’s evocation of gaslit Manhattan seems less digitally fake than the first season’s bright lights and big city.