What is it like to have an all-consuming romance over the course of 30 years? Screenwriter-director Ron Nyswaner has written movies for over four decades, earning an Oscar nomination for and has worked on critically acclaimed shows like and . And now, with Showtime’s limited series , Nyswaner makes his debut as a TV creator. Based on the Thomas Mallon novel, is a sweeping, tragic love story and political thriller chronicling the clandestine romance of two very different men who meet in the shadow of McCarthy-era Washington.
Matt Bomer plays Hawkins Fuller, a man with a successful career in politics who generally avoids emotional entanglements — until he meets the idealistic Tim Laughlin (Jonathan Bailey). The two 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 three decades, we follow the pair 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 themselves.
Here, Nyswaner talks about the long journey to adapt the novel, the changes he made to the book and the importance of queer representation on television. A friend of mine recommended another book by Thomas Mallon that I had read called , which was a great book. So that made me seek out another book, and I read .
I was really taken with the rel.