Review: 'Fellow Travelers' melodramatically charts a gay love story and politics

Novelist Thomas Mallon's 2007 historical romance "Fellow Travelers," having been translated in 2016 into a much produced opera, has now become a melodramatic, one might say almost say operatic, TV miniseries, created by Ron Nyswaner ("Philadelphia") and premiering Sunday on Showtime.

Readers of the book, which is set entirely against the Lavender Scare — the gay-targeting companion to the 1950s Red Scare — will recognize its major characters, certain events and even lines of dialogue, but in the service of blowing it up to streaming size, it has been larded with additional decades, settings, character and happenings. As the book took liberties with history ("my usual small liberties with historical fact, and more than my usual license with historical figures," as Mallon puts it in his acknowledgments), so does the series have its way with the book. Steps have been taken to involve — are here stripped down to the greatest hits of McCarthyism.