Spoiler warning for Fellow Travelers’ fifth episode, “Promise You Won’t Write.”
The epic love story of Fellow Travelers reaches a wrenching turning point in its fifth episode, now streaming on Paramount+ With Showtime. Hawkins “Hawk” Fuller (Matt Bomer) and Tim Laughlin (Jonathan Bailey), closeted political staffers working in McCarthy-Era Washington, find their passionate, at times fraught romantic affair suddenly untenable as the cultural circumstances surrounding them intensify. Hawk is compelled to commit to a romance he doesn’t believe in with Lucy Smith (Allison Williams), daughter of the senator to whom Hawk has dedicated his career, after tragedy strikes and the family breaks apart. Tim’s allegiance to Senator Joseph McCarthy (Chris Bauer) finally, firmly cracks as he sees the demagogue’s methods for what they are, just as the Lavender Scare reaches its apex.
The episode’s title, “Promise You Won’t Write,” comes from one of the episode’s last lines, and is drawn straight from the novel by Thomas Mallon, the loose basis for the show. It captures the longing our lovelorn heroes are left with. Tim joins the military. Hawk gets engaged to a woman. Their story ends here, for now—a choice creator Ron Nyswaner made by situating their separation in a juicy political context, against the backdrop of the downfall of McCarthy at his Senate censure hearing and a similar moment of reckoning for Roy Cohn (Will Brill), both stories of which were pulled from the public historical record. Nyswaner puts down his artistic stamp by unifying all of these tales—plus that of fictional Black journalist Marcus Hooks (Jelani Alladin) as he embarks on his own new path—under the harrowingly wide cloud of homophobia. In Fellow Travelers, as in the U.S. circa 1954, no one could escape it; its impact could be life-or-death.
In an exclusive breakdown of the end of Fellow Travelers’ time in the ‘50s, Nyswaner discusses his various storylines coming to a head at his series’s midpoint—as he gets ready to hurtle the action decades into the future.
**Vanity Fair: **This is a real narrative turning point and marks the end of the McCarthy era for the show. Why now?
Ron Nyswaner: The Army-McCarthy hearings are a very important part of the story, because it is where Joe McCarthy’s career comes to a crashing end. It just naturally seemed to fall here. I could develop the McCarthy/Cohn/Schine story through the first four episodes to this climactic point. Then it seemed, if that’s going to be that climax, it felt natural that this is where Tim sees who his hero really is—well, but not just one hero, but who both of his heroes really are. Hawk reveals himself to Tim in a way that is disturbing to him; McCarthy reveals himself to Tim in a way that is really disturbing to him. That leaves Tim, as he says—he’s lost. Then he joins the Army.
In all of the episode’s stories, this mere threat of outing informs seismic character changes, from Hawk to McCarthy to Cohn. It’s obviously a statement for the show as a whole and this era you’re working in. Can you just talk a little bit about understanding the sheer significance of that kind of threat coming to a head for characters here?
The Army-McCarthy hearings took place over weeks and weeks and weeks. The amount of transcripts are huge, but going into the research I really saw the very thing that you mentioned. You can look at the end of Joseph McCarthy’s career in those hearings as caused by homophobia. I actually think we make a good case for it.
A lot of people think of it as a moment we didn’t include, when Joseph Welch pounds his fist on the table and says, “Have you no decency, sir?” Like, at long last tapping into decency, and boom, that was it, McCarthy was over. I’m not alone, as there is a McCarthy biographer who agrees with me, but to me the moment was when the words “pixie and fairy” are introduced into the dialogue and are pointed right at McCarthy and Cohn. From the story that we’re telling, that was the natural climax of our show, because this demagogue who was the second most powerful person in the United States is brought down in flames, so to speak, by being painted with the gay brush. It destroyed his career. What I loved, and I twist it from the book, is that it was homosexuals in the show—Hawk and Tim; Tim unwittingly, Hawk wittingly—who bring down McCarthy and Cohn with homophobia. That great irony.
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