Review: ‘Fellow Travelers’ melodramatically charts a gay love story and politics

Novelist Thomas Mallon‘s 2007 historical romance “Fellow Travelers,” having been translated in 2016 into a much produced opera, has now become a melodramatic, one might say almost operatic, TV miniseries, created by Ron Nyswaner and premiering Sunday on Showtime. A moderately ambitious State Department middle manager, working in congressional relations, he has no politics to speak of, telling Tim, “I’m a registered Republican but I don’t vote because I really don’t see the point, and I feel pretty much the same way about God.” Tim, left, is a conservative anti-communist who gets a job working for Sen. Joe McCarthy. Marcus, a character created for the series, arrives to deliver a meaningful paperweight and the news that Tim, who has been “organizing his life, settling things” is dying of AIDS — and also doesn’t want to hear from Hawk. The 1950s and 1980s timelines will alternate through the first episodes; later there are trips to the ‘60s and ‘70s, each with its own complement of wigs, clothes, pop songs and drugs, as we chart the evolution of gay culture and rights as Hawk and Tim, rarely on the same page, come together and break apart — a bit like “The Way We Were,” with a touch of “Brokeback Mountain.” As Hawk, Bomer will not look substantially older as the decades pass; indeed, I had to check the decor and clothing to tell where we were at times. Tim has placed Hawk within McCarthy’s office because he wants a spy there in order to protect his old friend Sen. Wesley Smith, another Nyswaner invention, who is critical of McCarthy — and, perhaps more important, is the father of Lucy, who we already know will become Hawk’s wife.