Fellow "Travelers" Matt Bomer as Don Draper and Lots of Sex

Rolling Stones

 

In 2007, Matt Bomer would have been a little too young to play Don Draper on Mad Men. (Jon Hamm has six years on him.) In most other ways, though, he would have been perfect. He has the kind of chiseled, leading man features, and the charisma to match, that make him seem like a man from an earlier time. His breakout TV role, 2009’s White Collar, even contrived a reason to dress him in Rat Pack-era suits, and he’s appeared in a number of period pieces, most notably Amazon’s short-lived adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Last Tycoon. In that show, and in many of his other roles, he’s also demonstrated a great facility for playing men hiding trauma and other secrets deep below that beautiful facade he shows to the world.

With Showtime‘s new miniseries Fellow Travelers, Bomer finally gets to portray a closer approximation of Draper. In the adaptation of Thomas Mallon’s novel, Bomer plays Hawkins Fuller, a mid-century decorated military veteran turned mover and shaker, who will do anything to conceal the truth about himself, who has a terrifying gift for compartmentalization and denial, and who is married to a woman he loves, but is not as attracted to her as she believes. 

In this case, though, our protagonist’s story begins about a decade earlier, in the midst of the Red Scare being pushed by Senator Joseph McCarthy (Chris Bauer). And unlike Don, Hawkins’ war record is real, while his secret is far more dangerous: he’s a closeted gay man at a moment when homosexuals are being hunted just as much as communists.

Adapted by Ron Nyswaner (who 30 years ago wrote Philadelphia, one of the first big studio movies about gay men and AIDS), Fellow Travelers(*) attempts to be a decade-spanning epic. It not only follows the on-again, off-again secret romance between Hawkins and the more idealistic Tim Laughlin (Bridgerton‘s Jonathan Bailey), but shows the evolution of public attitudes toward homosexuality over 30-plus years, from McCarthyism to the AIDS crisis under Ronald Reagan. 

The historical piece, though, is much less effective than the character study of Hawkins, and the story of his grand, messy, and at times ugly love affair with Tim.

Mallon’s book takes place almost entirely during the height of McCarthy’s power, other than a framing device set in the early Nineties (Nyswaner plays around with time more). The framing device is now in 1986, as Hawkins takes a break from both his diplomatic career and his marriage to Lucy (Allison Williams) to reconnect with Tim, who has contracted AIDS. The first five episodes and the finale all shift between that storyline and the events of the early Fifties, while the sixth and seventh episodes check in on what was happening to the characters — and what it was like to be gay in America — during the late Sixties and late Seventies.

The idea of tracking the evolution of both the relationships and homophobia over this period is interesting in theory. But the Fifties episodes grow repetitive in their depiction of the cruelty and hypocrisy of McCarthy and his henchman Roy Cohn (Will Brill). Bauer is slathered in makeup, particularly a large prosthetic nose shaped like the one belonging to the man he’s playing. The real McCarthy would have seemed like a parody of a demagogue politician if he hadn’t been so dangerous and caused so much damage to so many people. It’s difficult, if not impossible, to dramatize him with any nuance. But the makeup and the writing render him a thin caricature compared to the fictional characters who are the show’s true interest(*). 

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(*) Bomer and the others have makeup issues of their own in the later episodes, which are very uneven in aging them up as the years pass. At times, it’s impressive how convincing that, say, Williams can look as a grandmother in the Eighties. At others, the only palpable difference between Hawkins from one decade to the next is how much gray they put in Bomer’s hair. It’s not a problem unique to this show — see also the last season of For All Mankind — but it’s a challenge nonetheless.

Chris Bauer as Senator McCarthy and Jonathan Bailey as Tim in ‘Fellow Travelers.’ PETER H. STRANKS/SHOWTIME

And by lingering so long in this era, it makes the Sixties and Seventies material, and even some of the Eighties plotline, feel both rushed and obligatory. It’s as if Nyswaner and company felt they ought to offer a glimpse of those eras, but couldn’t figure out how to, or simply didn’t want to, make the room to let them come to life(*). Either the show should have stuck to the original timeline of the novel, or it should have significantly reduced the real estate devoted to the McCarthy years to give everything after more room to breathe.

(*) Also feeling unfortunately like boxes are being checked is a subplot about Hawkins’ journalist friend Marcus (Jelani Alladin) struggling with the complications of being both queer and Black in the pre-Civil Rights days, and resisting his feelings for drag performer Frankie (Noah J. Ricketts). The intersectionality of it, and Marcus’ ability to point out how much better Hawkins has it than he does, seems very relevant to the larger historical context. And both Alladin and Ricketts deliver good performances. But the story is always very secondary to what’s happening with Hawkins and Tim, in a way that perhaps unintentionally supports Marcus’ argument about how the world sees him versus how it sees his white buddy.   

But if the structure is flawed, the acting and characterization of the central trio are not. Hawkins as a character is as well-tailored to Bomer’s strengths as the suits he wears in the role. Between his hidden life, his estranged relationship with his homophobic father, and psychological scarring from World War II, Hawkins has become a master of faking his way through almost every interaction and doing whatever is necessary to protect himself. It’s no surprise that he’s able to beat a polygraph exam featuring multiple questions about his sexuality, because he feels precious little guilt about what he does, both in the bedroom and out of it. It’s not until he meets Tim — and, really, not until he realizes that he sees Tim as more than a friend and occasional sexual partner — that he begins to feel qualms about how he treats other people. And even then, love doesn’t exactly redeem him, as we see him do terrible things to Tim, as well as marrying the initially oblivious Lucy to further hide who he is from the world. Bomer commands the screen like usual and doesn’t flinch from the many selfish, unsavory aspects of the character. He also holds nothing back in the frequent, explicit sex scenes, which do a fine job of illustrating his emotional issues — as well as his evolving relationship with Tim — rather than feeling salacious for their own sake.

Bailey and Williams, meanwhile, keep this particular triangle feeling relatively equilateral. Tim is ultimately a more complicated figure than Hawkins. In the Fifties, he is working for McCarthy, naively believing in the senator’s cause until he realizes what’s really going on. 

By the Eighties, he was a liberal gay rights activist who was working with Marcus and others to demand more government spending on AIDS research. And in between, he constantly wrestles with his deep Catholic faith, and with the idea that the God he loves might condemn him for being with the man he loves. Bailey gracefully navigates the many extremes of the journey and sells the idea that Tim could so often forgive Hawkins for treating him awfully.

Williams has what could be the most thankless role (see January Jones most of the time on Mad Men), but she and the writers keep finding compelling ways to demonstrate the travails of a woman in a marriage like this, both before and after she begins to understand the true nature of her relationship. It’s not really Lucy’s story, but that only enhances the steely force of Williams’ performance. Like Marcus and Frankie, she understandably wants to have her own story, rather than being collateral damage to someone else’s.

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Mainly, though, Bomer and Bailey are the drawing cards. They can’t entirely overcome some of the fundamental issues with how Fellow Travelers has attempted to move through time, and to mix fact with fiction, but they make the fictional part feel real, and poignant.

The first episode of Fellow Travelers is streaming now on Paramount+ with Showtime, and will premiere October 29 on the Showtime cable channel, with episodes releasing weekly on each. I’ve seen all eight episodes.