How 'Fellow Travelers' is Different From the BookBen Mark Holzberg
Oops!
Something went wrong.
Please try again later.
"Hearst Magazines and Yahoo may earn commission or revenue on some items through these links."
“Thomas Mallon is a great, great writer,” says Ron Nyswaner, the creator of Fellow Travelers, the new series based on Mallon’s 2007 novel airing now on Showtime. “I first became acquainted with his book Henry and Clara, which I was obsessed with years ago, and that led me to read Fellow Travelers, which I fell in love with.”
It’s an easy story to fall for. The novel follows two men working in 1950s Washington, D.C. and the searing, secret relationship that develops between them; it’s a love story, but one that’s uncommonly packed with intrigue and history, and it’s no wonder that Nyswaner, who previously worked on projects including My Policeman, Homeland, and Ray Donovan, wanted to adapt it for TV.
But the series (airing now), which stars Matt Bomer as the dashing and sometimes callous State Department official Hawkins Fuller and Jonathan Bailey as the wide-eyed Senate employee Tim Laughlin, isn’t exactly like the book. Instead, Fellow Travelers the series expands the story—a significant part of the action takes place decades after Mallon’s story ended, and new characters and plotlines expand the world of McCarthy-era D.C.—without losing the plot that made it so compelling. Here’s how they did it.
Keep The Main Characters Fellow Travelers, airing now on Showtime, stars Matt Bomer and Jonathan Bailey. The series is based on the beloved 2007 novel by Thomas Mallon.Courtesy of SHOWTIME
“Hawk and Tim are, I think, very much the characters that they are in the novel,” Nyswaner says. “But I took things that he hinted at—I thought also about my own life and how I came of age in the 1960s and ’70s—and wanted to do them larger. I wanted what I experienced in that time to be part of the show.”
So, while much of the show does take place in a cloak-and-dagger midcentury Washington, the series also flashes forward to the 1980s in San Francisco, showing viewers what’s become of the two men and chronicling the ways they’ve dealt with the changing world, the AIDS crisis, and queer liberation. Still, the driving dynamic between the two characters—a kind of star-crossed love that is, at times, too painful to endure—remains at the heart of the series.
But Build a New World Around Them The main characters from the novel are still front and center, but others—like Allison WilliamsBen Mark Holzberg
While some characters, like Roy Cohn and Senator Joseph McCarthy, loom large in both the book and the series, others are newly invented to help make the story work in a new format.
“Crafting a television drama involves a lot of problem solving,” Nyswaner says. “I had a very captivating main character, Hawkins Fuller, who is apolitical and amoral in a sense. I was truck with this problem from the original material: how do I get him involved with the plot of the story?”
Inspired by real characters from the era in American history, Nyswaner developed plotlines that would bring Fuller deeper into the world of the politicians around him, and complicated the character’s life by giving his wife, Lucy (played by Allison Williams), her own ties to the D.C. establishment. “I had to find some reason to connect Hawkins Fuller and Tim more closely to the essential drama,” Nyswaner explains, “and I wanted to bring McCarthy and Cohn forward as characters because I think they're utterly fascinating. You have to bring people together in dramatic situations, so by tightening that world, now Hawk is closer to the plot.”
Find New Angles Some characters in the series, like Noah J. Ricketts as Frankie Hines and Jelani Alladin as Marcus Gaines, didn’t appear in the novel.Ben Mark Holzberg
While part of what makes Mallon’s book so exciting is its intense focus on its main characters, to bring the story to the small screen, Fellow Travelers brought more of them into the mix. One of the most interesting is Marcus Gaines (Jelani Alladin), a closeted Black journalist trying to make a name for himself in the political press corps. He and Fuller are regulars at the Cozy Corner, a bar where drag artists performed, and where Gaines finds an unexpected relationship. It’s not part of the plot of the book but feels totally at home among the world Mallon created.
“It was challenging to be white and queer in the 1950s, so what was it like to be Black and queer in the 1950s,” Nyswaner asks. “What we tried to do with Fellow Travelers was that if we were going to invent, we were going to take our inventions as much as possible from history. They're based on something that we can point to. There were Black journalists writing about the government at that time; there was a Black journalist named Simeon Booker, who as far as we know was not gay, but he did face discrimination throughout his career. And I took those inspirations and created Marcus.”
Don’t Lose What You Love Much of the dialogue between Hawkins Fuller and Tim Laughlin from Thomas Mallon’s novel was used on screen in Fellow Travelers.Ben Mark Holzberg
Fellow Travelers the series might expand upon the world that Mallon built, but Nyswaner didn’t want to give up any of what made the book so special—including the way that Fuller and Laughlin spoke to one another in public and private alike. That dialogue was so important, in fact, that the writers of the series created a document of everything the men said to one another in the book and made a point of using it on screen whenever possible. “There was so much that I took from the book and spread throughout the show,” Nyswaner says, “even throughout different decades in some cases. I loved the way Thomas Mallon had them speak to one another. Hawk and Tim are, I think, very much the characters that they are in the novel. I think they are true to that.”
Marvin Harrison Jr., Fanatics said, “rejected or ignored every request” from the company while refusing to fulfill obligations of their contract that was signed last May.
All five of these hitters were drafted highly in fantasy baseball leagues. So far, they have not lived up to their ADPs — and that's an understatement. Scott Pianowski analyzes.
