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Fellow Travelers Review

Fellow Travelers is a historical romance political thriller series that premiered on Paramount+ in 2023. It’s a long, but very moving and wonderfully performed show.

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“Hello, Skippy“

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After a chance encounter in Washington in the 1950s, Hawkins Fuller and Timothy Laughlin start a volatile romance that spans the Vietnam War protests of the 1960s, the drug-fueled disco hedonism of the 1970s and the AIDS crisis of the 1980s. Created by Ron Nyswaner and based on a novel, this series is a mix of genres, in particular a period romance and a political thriller. It mostly succeeds at both of these.

The best reason to see Fellow Travelers is for the acting. The performances are uniformly fantastic on this show that was perfectly cast and wonderfully characterized. Matt Bomer portrayers Hawkins, a closeted gay man who is all about being “bulletproof”. His survivalist lifestyle is cleverly contrasted with his partner’s more idealistic nature. Hawkins is effectively the main character of the story and Bomer is the acting standout. He has always been a terrific, highly underrated performer and this is easily his best work yet. He’s fantastic at the more emotional scenes and it also helps significantly that he is a phenomenal fit for the fifties aesthetically.

Jonathan Bailey is also a revelation. I hadn’t known this actor before watching this series, but now I am interested to see more from him. He also fits the part and he was very charismatic throughout. Tim is the activist type, a guy who just cannot stand by the side as injustices happen to his community. The two are basically polar opposites, which is exactly why they were so interesting as a pairing. The chemistry between the actors was electric, which helped sell their sex scenes a lot, and those sex scenes were consistently different and very sexy.

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Allison Williams is very good as Hawk’s discontented wife. I highly respected the show for honestly depicting the plight of women married to gay men without vilifying or excusing their life choices. It was a rare sophisticated, truthful depiction of this issue. The scenes with his son were very moving and his death definitely was heartbreaking.

The bulk of this season is devoted to the fifties and McCarthyism in particular. While I found many of those sections riveting and quite intense, I would have personally devoted more time to the later decades. This way, some episodes felt a bit stretched out and the show overall would have been much stronger had it consisted of six instead of eight episodes. It really needed a brisker pace in the second half in particular.

But that whole drama with McCarthy, Cohn and others was so engaging. It was important to portray everything that happened in this crazy period in US history and realizing that all of this actually happened was insane to me. The series reached genuinely suspenseful territory in that fifties section as we got to witness just how difficult living as a gay man was back then. The show incisively dealt with the hypocrisy and corruption of politicians in this era and that unapologetic approach was quite admirable.

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As for the AIDS scenes, they were familiar, but still highly emotionally effective. The show achieved genuine emotional resonance due to strong characterization, excellent performances and fantastic dialogue that was believable throughout. The two main characters were beautifully written and they felt like real, complex human beings. I also liked the lesbian subplot, though it was a bit rushed. The black gay couple received a lot of screen time and they complemented the main pair wonderfully.