Showtime
We are suffering from a catastrophic dearth of horniness, dear reader. The need for sex scenes is being discoursed to high hell. Films where sex—explicit sex, in particular—is an integral part of the storyline are being slapped with NC-17 ratings, forcing the likes of Passages and Blonde into brief runs in small arthouse theaters before landing on streaming services. For god’s sake, men are hardly even showing nipples anymore, let alone getting cheeked-up on camera!
Blessedly, Showtime’s limited series Fellow Travelers has arrived to provide an antidote for this chronic sickness, just as the anti-sex poison was threatening to shut down our systems entirely. (Not 10 minutes into the premiere, there’s already full-on fucking.) The scintillating drama is heavy on the fornication, but it’s not just in the interest of showing sex on screen, either.
Instead, it’s a series that effortlessly straddles its hot-and-heavy love scenes with dramatic tension that’s equally as scorching, and there’s no example of that so fine as the series’ premiere episode, which is inarguably the most sweltering episode of television this year. Each sex scene is rife with the kind of passion that all of the great novels, plays, and poems are written about. But sex without love is just porn, and while the more conservative viewer might jump to equate the two in this context, Fellow Travelers is careful to keep the balance in its first episode to begin crafting one of the most compelling televised love stories in recent memory.