After working for three years on Showtime’s lauded spy thriller Homeland, Ron Nyswaner had a quite different vision for the look, feel and sound of Fellow Travelers, a series that would apply the momentum of that genre to “a love story.”
Coming into the work on the series, for which he served as creator, writer and executive producer, he had “a few rules” in mind for his team, one of which was that “every scene is about power and tension” — that even in love scenes rife with beauty, “there was an exchange of power.”
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At once an epic love story, a political thriller, and a work of historical fiction traversing decades, Showtime’s Fellow Travelers adapts the 2007 novel of the same name by Thomas Mallon. Opening in the 1950s, the limited series centers on Matt Bomer’s charismatic Hawk, who maintains a financially rewarding, behind-the-scenes career in politics, and avoids emotional entanglements until he meets Tim (Jonathan Bailey), a young man brimming with idealism and religious faith. The pair begin a romance just as Joseph McCarthy and Roy Cohn declare war on “subversives and sexual deviants,” initiating one of the darkest periods in 20th-century American history. Over the course of four decades, we then follow the duo as they cross paths through the Vietnam War protests of the 1960s, the drug-fueled disco hedonism of the 1970s and the AIDS crisis of the 1980s, while facing obstacles in the world and within themselves.
When Paul Leonard-Morgan was met with this “phenomenal story” and boarded the project as its composer, he knew straightaway that he’d eschew the trappings of “a big, glossy Hollywood soundtrack” in favor of something entirely more intimate, which would provide continuity for the story without “signposting” musically as it moved through the decades.
In today’s episode of our craft series The Process, pairing Leonard-Morgan and Nyswaner, the former explains that the score was ultimately driven by its two well-crafted lead characters, Tim and Hawk. With Tim, Leonard-Morgan thought about the character’s “innocence, almost naivety,” favoring a more simple sound.
“Hawk is like, well, what is behind this? You’ve got this very solid exterior, but there’s got to be something behind it,” the composer reflects. “Here’s someone that will sell his soul, will sell anything to get what he wants, but gradually there’s got to be something softer underneath that exterior.”
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The dynamic between the characters led Leonard-Morgan to the piano and cello as instruments foundational to the score. “I was like…Tim will be the cello; Hawk will be the piano. You start soundtracks with an intellectual idea, and sometimes they work, sometimes they don’t,” he notes. “And I was like, well, if every time Tim and Hawk get together you’ve got the beauty and simplicity of that cello coming over Hawk’s piano, that would be really nice.”
While it’s been gratifying to see such a positive response to his own work on Fellow Travelers, the main takeaway for Leonard-Morgan is how the series overall has connected so deeply with people.
“So many of my friends…have spoken about how the series has been important to them as part of their life, about how it’s helped them, whether they’re transitioning, whether it’s helped them as far as coming out, whether it’s helped them as far as straight people just actually sort of being more honest with people,” he says. “It’s not just a love story and it’s not just espionage. It’s not just McCarthyism, although I’ve learned so much about the politics and oh my God, in this day and age, nothing’s changed.
“All of those things aside,” he tells Nyswaner, “what you’ve achieved is something which doesn’t happen on TV. It’s that something has a life outside of what you’ve done, and I think that’s brilliant.”
To view the full conversation, in which Nyswaner gets into a more full dissection of the work on Fellow Travelers, while touching on lessons learned from his mentor Jonathan Demme and other topics, click above.