The shiny new drama Fellow Travelers glides through all the major markers of prestige television. Glossy production values, multiple timelines, a combination of sweeping score and expensive needle drops – it’s almost appointment viewing by numbers, carefully ticking boxes we’ve seen ticked to exhaustion over the last two decades. But within the first 10 minutes of the opening episode, we also see something that’s notably less familiar, if not absent, even in the expansive bloat of streaming TV: explicit gay sex.
It’s surprising to find it outside of more niche queer content, but especially so in a show that is otherwise rather too polite in its posture and politics – a Sunday night romance designed to appeal to a straight mom-and-pop audience. The sex scenes are both jaw-droppingly graphic and crucial to the plot, a convincing riposte to the recent argument posed by puritans that watching actors simulate sex is not just morally dubious but unnecessary. Throughout the eight episodes, which span almost 40 years, a tragic love affair is given much needed texture via sex, and it is the most intriguingly transgressive element of a series that could have benefited from taking a few more risks.
