Queer as Folk, Will & Grace, It’s a Sin: it’s not as if TV hasn’t tackled the gay male experience – and well – before. But I can’t think of a gay, straight (as it were) drama that matches the sweep and sheer mainstream gloss of Ron Nyswaner’s new eight-part Paramount+ series Fellow Travelers.
Nor can I think of one that does sex quite as brilliantly – frequent, searingly hot, sometimes tender, sometimes perfunctory, sometimes borderline brutal (one of the writers’ rules, Nyswaner has said, was “that we would never repeat the same act. When we got to episode eight, we were really kind of flummoxed”) and always articulate in a way that the necessarily secretive characters can’t be.
