Fellow Travelers (TV Program)

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    Matt Bomer Takes the Lead

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    Once told he would never be a leading man if he came out, Bomer defied such predictions and, in projects like “Fellow Travelers” and “Maestro,” is getting some of the richest roles of his career.In 2001, the actor Matt Bomer took a role in “Guiding Light.” He had resisted it at first. A graduate of Carnegie Mellon University’s vaunted musical theater program, he felt that a soap opera was beneath him. But a few theater jobs hadn’t gone anywhere, and he had recently lost a bellman gig at a midtown hotel, so when the chance came up to play Ben Reade, a trust fund baby turned sex worker, he signed on.Bomer had been afraid of being on camera. “I was terrified of anybody seeing that close to my soul,” he said. On the soap, he learned to say his lines, hit his marks, make a choice and stick to it. The camera left his soul alone.In 2002, he asked the producers to write him off. He had been told that he was the director’s choice for a major new superhero movie. Then, he believes, the movie’s producers discovered that he was gay. That movie was never made.Bomer has never been sure if that’s why the project fell apart. Like marriages and dishwashers, movies in preproduction have many ways to fail. Still, he took from the experience a painful lesson. He couldn’t be himself and have the career he wanted. Around the same time, a producer (Bomer didn’t name him) told him that if he came out publicly, he would never play leads.In the Showtime series “Fellow Travelers,” Bomer, left, and Jonathan Bailey play lovers during the Lavender Scare of the 1950s.ShowtimeIt took 20 years, but Bomer, 46, has proved that producer wrong. He can currently be seen in two major projects: the Netflix film “Maestro,” which came to Netflix on Wednesday, and the Showtime romantic drama “Fellow Travelers,” set during and after the Lavender Scare of the 1950s, in which gay men and women were denied and purged from government jobs.In the series, which concluded last week, Bomer plays Hawkins Fuller, a state department operative with a promising career, a loving wife and a passionate entanglement with a man, played by Jonathan Bailey (“Bridgerton”). Driven, magnetic, emotionally opaque, Fuller — Hawk to his intimates — has all the signifiers of a prestige drama antihero. His is a leading role. Bomer, playing him, is a leading man.“Before this I was like, why can’t we have our Don Draper? Why can’t we have our Walter White?” Bomer said. “I don’t think I could have done it if I hadn’t worked on all the projects leading up to it.”Bomer grew up in Spring, Tex., a suburb of Houston. His family went to church several times a week, and that church considered homosexuality an abomination, so Bomer spent much of his childhood and adolescence running from himself. In high school, he participated in forensics, football, student council, Latin Club. “Anything that kept me busy,” he said. He also acted, landing his first professional job at 18. In theater, inside the skin of a character, he felt free.He began to date men in college, during a year abroad in Ireland. A decade into his career, once he had recurred on several series, co-starred in a Jodie Foster movie (“Flightplan”) and was firmly ensconced as the breezy lead of the USA cop-and-con-man procedural “White Collar,” he came out while receiving a humanitarian award, in 2012. He was already married then, to the publicist Simon Halls, and the father of three young boys.Bomer came out while he was still playing the breezy (and straight) lead of the USA cop-and-con-man procedural “White Collar.”David Giesbrecht/USA NetworkBomer isn’t sure that it was an ideal time to come out. “White Collar” was still airing, and the first “Magic Mike” film, in which he plays one of the exotic dancers, would soon premiere. But he was tired of running. And he was happy.“I just thought, I don’t want to hide this,” he recalled on a recent morning. “Love is more important to me than anything that being my true self cost me.”We had met an hour earlier in the middle of a West Village street. The plan had been to walk around the neighborhood, Bomer’s favorite in the city. (Although he is based in Los Angeles, he and Halls have an apartment nearby.) But it was near freezing, so after a few moments we ducked into the glassed-in back room of a pastry shop on Bleecker Street.I can confirm that if you are a person who enjoys the company of handsome men, it is very nice to sip herbal tea across the table from Bomer. He has dark hair, light eyes, a jaw so square it could be used for geometry tutorials. Wrap that up in an off-white turtleneck sweater, and it’s heartthrob city. I had mentioned to a few friends that I would be meeting him, and they all wanted me to ask the same question: How does it feel to be that handsome?Bomer doesn’t discount his looks, but he has the decency to be mildly embarrassed by them. “We were raised in my home to always be very humble and to not be worldly in that regard,” he said. “Having said that, I make sure to moisturize.” He favors writers and directors who see him as more than a pretty face and sculpted abs. And there is more: impishness, candor, a sense of wounds long healed.“There’s a real sort of confident vulnerability about Matt,” said Bailey, his “Fellow Travelers” co-star.Coming out altered Bomer’s professional trajectory, though it didn’t necessarily diminish it. “I mean, there are certain rooms that I haven’t been in since,” he said. “But I think my career became so much richer.”As “White Collar” wound down, he took on several gay roles. He appeared in Dustin Lance Black’s “8,” a play about the overturning of the amendment banning same-sex marriage in California. He followed that with turns in Ryan Murphy’s film adaptations of “The Normal Heart” and “The Boys in the Band,” both seminal works of gay theater.“I feel like I’ve been watching straight people express their sexuality in front of me my entire life,” Bomer said. “Now you can watch some of our experience onscreen.”Sabrina Santiago for The New York TimesIn casting Bomer in “The Normal Heart,” Murphy recalled thinking: “Maybe this is the role that can show the world what Matt can do. I remember saying to him, ‘I can tell you can do this because you have a lot to prove.’” He also perceived that Bomer, an actor who had always relied on technique and charm, who had seen performance as one more way to hide, had a deep emotional well to draw from.“He knows what it’s like to struggle, and he knows what it’s like to be afraid, and he knows what it’s like to have people not believe in you,” Murphy said.Even as he played these gay roles, he continued on with straight ones, building a résumé that would not have been available to an out actor even a decade before. Murphy cast him opposite Lady Gaga in a season of “American Horror Story,” and he appeared as a Hollywood producer in a miniseries version of “The Last Tycoon.” He also filmed a second “Magic Mike” movie.Three and a half years ago, he read “Fellow Travelers,” the Thomas Mallon novel on which the series is based, with an eye toward starring in the adaptation. He was interested, but he didn’t really expect it to go forward. “There was a central part of me that has been in the business since I was 18, thinking, ‘Are the gatekeepers really going to give this the budget that it needs?’” he recalled.But the gatekeepers did. Ron Nyswaner, the showrunner of the series, wanted Bomer for the lead, intuiting that he could play both what Hawk shows to the world (charisma, ambition) and what he conceals (heart, desire, anguish).“Matt, for all his physical attractiveness and charm, he understands emotional pain,” Nyswaner said.When I asked Bomer what of himself he had given to Hawk, in terms of both effort and personal experience, his answer was simple: “Everything.” Finally, he is letting the camera see into his soul. In most scenes, Bomer plays two or three emotions simultaneously, some across the surface of his face and others roiling underneath. The show includes several unusually intimate sex scenes, and Bomer gave himself to these, too. With the consent of his co-star and an intimacy coordinator, he even improvised a few unscripted moments, as when Hawk licks a lover’s armpit.“I feel like I’ve been watching straight people express their sexuality in front of me my entire life,” Bomer said. “Now you can watch some of our experience onscreen.”In “Maestro,” Bomer plays a colleague and lover of Leonard Bernstein’s. (With Bradley Cooper.)NetflixIf Bomer has his way, there will be more to watch. He appears in Bradley Cooper’s “Maestro,” as the clarinetist and producer David Oppenheim, a colleague and lover of Leonard Bernstein’s. And there are plans for other series: a queer espionage drama, an adaptation of another novel. (His dream project is a “Murder She Wrote” reboot.) Then of course there are his other roles: husband, father, son, brother, advocate and activist for human rights.Bailey, who is a decade younger, described him as “a blinding light — a good blinding light! — of energy and commitment.” Bomer was someone he had looked to as he navigated his own career, a man who had nudged open a door and kept it open for others who came after. “He’s a beacon,” Bailey said.Predictably, Bomer takes a humbler approach. His concern is for what he has received, not what he might provide. His life has taken him, he said, from an industry suspicious of queer storytelling to one more receptive. From running from himself to settling down with a family and faith rooted in love and acceptance. Another man might discount the earlier years — the division, the prejudice, the pain — but Bomer doesn’t. It has made him who he is: a leading man and a man now able to take the lead in his own life.“I’m grateful, ultimately, that I got to see both sides,” he said. More

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      To Make ‘Fellow Travelers,’ Ron Nyswaner Had to Fall in Love

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      The new drama, which follows a gay romance over several decades, is the first TV series created by the Oscar-winning writer of “Philadelphia.”Ron Nyswaner, the Oscar- and Emmy-nominated screenwriter, can still recall a chance meeting on a beach more than 50 years ago. Then a teenager and a self-described “Jesus freak,” he’d come to Ocean City, N.J., to attend a Youth for Christ conference. Late one night, he said, while walking alone, he saw “a gorgeous, muscular guy” across the sand.That young man asked him to speak in tongues — it was an invitation to religious ecstasy and nothing more. Nyswaner complied. He told me this story over lunch in Manhattan’s Soho neighborhood, on a stormy afternoon in September, as a way to explain that, for him, “sex and the sacred have always been united.”He wanted that same union for “Fellow Travelers,” a new series that premieres Friday on Paramount+ and then on Showtime on Sunday.Moving back and forth from the early 1950s to the late ’80s, “Fellow Travelers,” based on the 2007 novel of the same name by Thomas Mallon, is a précis of 20th-century queer history viewed through a turbulent relationship between two men. Matt Bomer (“White Collar,” “Magic Mike”) stars as Hawkins Fuller, Hawk to his intimates, a State Department employee. Jonathan Bailey (“Bridgerton”) plays Tim Laughlin, a milk-drinking, God-loving naïf who dreams of working for Senator Joseph McCarthy.As they tumble through the decades — in and out of bed, in and out of love — the lavender scare, the gay liberation movement and the AIDS crisis happen around and through them.In “Fellow Travelers,” Jonathan Bailey, left, and Matt Bomer play men who move in and out of one another’s lives as history unfolds around them.Ben Mark Holzberg/ShowtimeNyswaner, who was dressed in all black save for a tan raincoat, claims to dislike love stories. “Yuck!” he said. (The two chunky rings he wore, mementos of former relationships, may have belied this.) But his genius resides in making the political feel shockingly intimate. Despite its many congressional hearings, “Fellow Travelers” is a love story, one illustrated with some of television’s most screen-fogging queer sex scenes. The first time Nyswaner read the novel, he fell in love with Tim and Hawk. It was that love — sexual, sacred — that inspired him to make the series, the first he has created for television.Nyswaner, 67, grew up in small-town Pennsylvania. Gay and closeted, he was an outsider as a child, an observer. That, he believes, is what made him a writer. After graduating from the University of Pittsburgh, he enrolled in Columbia’s film school. While still a student there, he slipped a script to the director Jonathan Demme. Demme optioned it, and Nyswaner has supported himself as a writer ever since.His first major success came in 1993 with “Philadelphia,” directed by Demme, the story of Andrew Beckett (Tom Hanks), a lawyer who believes he has been wrongfully terminated by his firm because of his AIDS diagnosis. (Nyswaner, whose script earned him an Oscar nomination, makes a cameo in a party scene dressed as a priest.)By that time, Nyswaner was in the throes of drug and alcohol addiction. In the five years after the film’s release, newly flush with fame and cash, his addiction worsened.“I dedicated myself to cocaine and alcohol and sex, with tragic results,” he said. (He details this tragedy, which involves the suicide of a sex worker, in his 2004 memoir, “Blue Days, Black Nights.”)There was heat on him in Hollywood then. But he showed up to more than one meeting high on methamphetamines, and the heat dissipated. Which didn’t especially bother him. Having found success early, he has rarely been swayed by the demands of the market.“I always just wanted to write what I wanted,” he said.“The best thing you can do with any marginalized character is to make them as fully human and complicated as every other straight character that’s out there in the world,” Nyswaner said.Erik Tanner for The New York TimesNewly sober, he proved this. He scripted the 2003 true-crime Showtime film “Soldier’s Girl,” about an Army private’s relationship with a transgender cabaret performer, and followed that with the 2006 adaptation of W. Somerset Maugham’s doomed romance, “The Painted Veil.” Neither was intended for mainstream success, but these works had the heartbreak he loved, the passionate intensity.In 2012, his management team asked him what he wanted to do next. “Get me out of my house,” he told them. He had spent two decades living in upstate New York. Now, he found himself craving the crush of a big city and the camaraderie of a writers’ room. Though he had already optioned “Fellow Travelers,” he back-burnered it in favor of moving to Los Angeles and joining two Showtime series: first the punchy noir “Ray Donovan,” and then “Homeland,” the fervid espionage thriller. In 2018, when his time on “Homeland” ended, he felt ready to turn to “Fellow Travelers.”In “Fellow Travelers,” Nyswaner expands on the themes that define much of his film work — the ways in which longing, sex and secrets intersect with the law. In the series, the historical characters and events are meticulously researched. (There are perhaps a few aesthetic lapses — did men really work out this much in the 1950s?) But Nyswaner wanted to offer something more than a history lesson. Hawk and Tim and the show’s other queer characters are intimately involved in this history, and they are not mere bystanders and victims. Occasionally, they are aggressors.“The best thing you can do with any marginalized character is to make them as fully human and complicated as every other straight character that’s out there in the world,” he said.Many of those complications are revealed in the sex scenes. Thirty years ago, “Philadelphia” received criticism for shying away from gay sexuality. “Fellow Travelers” is not so shy. “Perhaps I overcompensated,” he said, laughing.Nyswaner said each sex scene was intended to move the story forward and dramatize a power exchange.ShowtimeNyswaner, who has something of the provocateur in him, described a scene late in the series, a threesome that leads to a nervous breakdown, as “very much me” and “one of my proudest achievements.” (For that scene he educated the director on the uses of amyl nitrate.)If these scenes are not especially graphic, they are unusually specific in their mapping of power and desire. Nyswaner had rules for these scenes, which were carefully choreographed and scripted. Each had to move the story forward. Each had to dramatize a power exchange. And no act could be repeated, which invited creativity in the later episodes.The queer characters are all played by actors who openly identify as queer. “It wasn’t a requirement, but it was certainly a strong motivator for us,” Nyswaner said. He believes the casting may have contributed to the veracity and intensity of these scenes.“I do think it might have really made a difference and made everybody more comfortable,” he said.Nyswaner isn’t sure if writing about gay characters is a path that he chose for himself or one that the success of “Philadelphia” forged for him. Either way he is glad to walk it.“I so love, love, love being a gay man,” he told me over lunch. “I enjoy being slightly to the side of everything.” He worries, of course, for the state of L.G.B.T.Q. rights, but he has always enjoyed this feeling of being an outsider. “Outlaw” was another term he used.He isn’t dating anyone just now. His preference, he said, is for “unsuitable men, some of them are quite delicious.” Colleagues keep encouraging him to download a dating app, but so far he has resisted. These past few years, his primary relationship has been with Tim and Hawk, the characters he fell for a decade ago.“I wanted to live within that relationship,” he said. “And I have.” More

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      Fall TV 2023: New and Returning Shows to Watch

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      Even with much of Hollywood on strike, there will be plenty of notable new and returning shows arriving in the next few months.We’ve been here before. In 2020, to be exact, when it was the pandemic that played havoc with fall network television schedules.The effects of the writers’ and actors’ strikes this year are a little less drastic — they took hold later in the production cycle than the pandemic did, and they only affect American series. But once again we are looking at lineups full of reality programs and game shows. Fox will still have its animation lineup (their long lead times mean more episodes were completed); CBS will repurpose and recycle (“Yellowstone,” the original British “Ghosts”); CW will offer a Canadian smorgasbord. On cable, streaming and PBS, meanwhile, with shorter seasons and more flexible scheduling, the effects are not so noticeable.Here is a roundup of strike-proof shows on fall schedules. Dates are subject to change.September‘THE SUPER MODELS’ Naomi Campbell, Cindy Crawford, Linda Evangelista and Christy Turlington Burns are executive producers of this documentary series about their ’90s heyday, which promises to be as luxurious as the goods they modeled. (Apple+, Sept. 20 )‘SEX EDUCATION’ With Moordale Secondary closed, everyone has to get used to a new school in the fourth and final season of this popular, award-winning, sex-positive soap opera. (Netflix, Sept. 21)‘YOUNG LOVE’ “Hair Love,” the Oscar-winning animated short film from 2019 about a Black father learning to style his daughter’s hair, has been expanded into an animated series about a Chicago family. (Max, Sept. 21)‘THE CONTINENTAL: FROM THE WORLD OF JOHN WICK’ Mel Gibson headlines this three-episode extension of the John Wick universe, a prequel focused on a private hotel for assassins called the Continental. Colin Woodell (“The Flight Attendant”), as the future proprietor Winston Scott, has the unenviable task of convincing us that he’s a younger version of Ian McShane. (Peacock, Sept. 22)‘DEADLOCKED: HOW AMERICA SHAPED THE SUPREME COURT’ Dawn Porter (“John Lewis: Good Trouble”) directed this four-part documentary about the modern history of the Supreme Court. (Showtime, Sept. 22)‘KRAPOPOLIS’ Dan Harmon, creator of “Community” and “Rick and Morty,” joins Fox’s Sunday-night lineup with a comedy about a young king (Richard Ayoade) trying to foster civilization in a brightly animated ancient Greece. Fox has ordered three seasons of the show, which if nothing else will provide ample opportunity for the inimitable Matt Berry to voice the king’s father, a debauched half-centaur, half-manticore. (Fox, Sept. 24)Created by Dan Harmon, “Krapopolis” joins Fox’s Sunday night animation lineup.Fox‘THE IRRATIONAL’ Jesse L. Martin, a star of “Rent” on Broadway and a “Law & Order” mainstay for nine seasons, gets his own show for the first time in a three-decade TV career. In mainstream TV’s long tradition of offbeat crime solvers, he plays a behavioral scientist whose quirky team tackles “illogical puzzles and perplexing mysteries.” (NBC, Sept. 25)‘FRIEREN: BEYOND JOURNEY’S END’ This anime series begins after its heroes have completed their ultimate mission; one of the group, the elf Frieren, will outlive her human companions by hundreds of years and come to regret not having known them better. In a genre that gives a lot of space to melancholia, “Frieren” is particularly wistful. (Crunchyroll, Sept. 29)‘GEN V’ Amazon expands the world of its buzziest show, “The Boys,” with a spinoff set in a college for superheroes. (Amazon Prime Video, Sept. 29)October‘BOB’S BURGERS’ Fourteen seasons in (with No. 15 already ordered), Loren Bouchard’s animated comedy remains the sweetest, truest series about family love and dysfunction. With the recent revitalization of “The Simpsons,” it makes Sunday night on Fox the closest thing left to a destination on terrestrial TV. (Fox, Oct. 1)‘FOUND’ Shanola Hampton of “Shameless” stars as a public-relations expert who looks for missing persons of color in NBC’s second new series about an unconventional crime-solving team (after “The Irrational”). (NBC, Oct. 3)Shanola Hampton and Bill Kelly in “Found,” coming to NBC in October.Steve Swisher/NBC‘THE SPENCER SISTERS’ Lea Thompson, starring in a live-action series for the first time since ABC Family’s “Switched at Birth” ended in 2017, plays a Canadian mystery writer who solves crimes with her ex-cop daughter. The joke is that the vain, libidinous mom and the no-nonsense daughter get mistaken for sisters, or so the mother would believe; call it “Murder, She Flirted.” (CW, Oct. 4)‘BARGAIN’ The story line of this Korean series involving an organ auction, a remote location and an earthquake carries some “Squid Game” vibes. (Paramount+, Oct. 5)‘LUPIN’ Netflix’s contemporary take on a classic French character, the turn-of-the-previous-century master thief Arsène Lupin, resurfaces more than two years after its last appearance. Omar Sy returns as the Lupin aficionado Assane Diop, who spent the show’s first two seasons clearing the name of his unjustly imprisoned father. (Netflix, Oct. 5)‘OUR FLAG MEANS DEATH’ David Jenkins’s singular concoction — a queer romance and office sitcom set aboard an 18th-century pirate ship — returns for a second season. (Max, Oct. 5)‘TRANSPLANT’ A pre-strike Canadian import, this conventionally well-made medical drama about a Syrian refugee (Hamza Haq) who becomes a surgeon at a Toronto hospital enters its third season, with Rekha Sharma replacing John Hannah as the chief of the emergency room. (NBC, Oct. 5)‘LOKI’ The most multiverse-y of the Disney+ Marvel series returns for a second season, with Tom Hiddleston as a variant of the shifty Norse god Loki who is reluctantly attached to a timeline-policing authority. The Oscar winner Ke Huy Quan joins the cast. (Disney+, Oct. 6)From left, Tom Hiddleston, Ke Huy Quan and Owen Wilson in “Loki.”Gareth Gatrell/Marvel, via Disney+‘THE FALL OF THE HOUSE OF USHER’ Having adapted Shirley Jackson (“The Haunting of Hill House”) and Henry James (“The Haunting of Bly Manor”) for Netflix, Mike Flanagan tackles Edgar Allan Poe in a story that reimagines the Ushers as a big-pharma family. Flanagan regulars like Carla Gugino, Henry Thomas and Michael Trucco return. (Netflix, Oct. 12)‘FRASIER’ Intellectual property that deserves the name. The sparkling sitcom returns with Kelsey Grammer’s sniffy psychiatrist, Frasier Crane, having relocated to Boston (scene of the character’s original incarnation in “Cheers”) after his 1993-2004 run in Seattle. Not making the trip, unfortunately, is David Hyde Pierce as Frasier’s brother, Niles, nor, apparently, any of the other original cast members. (Paramount+, Oct. 12)‘GOOSEBUMPS’ R.L. Stine’s series of comic horror books for teenagers, already the basis of a popular series on Fox Kids in the 1990s, gets a new adaptation created by Nicholas Stoller (“Forgetting Sarah Marshall”) and Rob Letterman (the 2015 “Goosebumps” feature film). (Disney+, Oct. 13)‘LESSONS IN CHEMISTRY’ Apple has shown a taste for shows with a nostalgic flavor, whether or not they are set in the past — “Hello Tomorrow!,” “Physical,” “The Morning Show.” (Remember when morning shows mattered?) Brie Larson stars in this one as a woman in the 1950s who channels her skills as a scientist into hosting a cooking show. (Apple+, Oct. 13)Brie Larson stars in “Lessons in Chemistry” as a scientist turned cooking show host.Apple TV+‘SHINING VALE’ Courteney Cox, as a blocked writer who moves to the suburbs, and Mira Sorvino, as the jealous ghost haunting the writer’s new house, return in a comic take on “The Shining” whose first season was cleverly macabre. (Starz, Oct. 13)‘ANNIKA’ The second season of this under-the-radar British cop show will be American viewers’ only ration of the wonderful actress Nicola Walker this fall, now that “The Split” and her run in “Unforgotten” have ended. Walker plays the leader of a “marine homicide unit” based in Glasgow. (PBS, Oct. 15)‘BILLY THE KID’ It’s not obvious why this workmanlike western with the British actor Tom Blyth in the title role got a second season, but it may have something to do with the track record of its creator, the British writer Michael Hirst, who was also responsible for “The Tudors” and “Vikings.” (MGM+, Oct. 15)‘RICK AND MORTY’ The seventh season of the celebrated sci-fi cartoon will be the first without Justin Roiland, who created the show with Dan Harmon and voiced both of the title characters. (Adult Swim cut ties with Roiland after his 2020 arrest on domestic abuse charges was publicized; the charges have since been dropped.) (Adult Swim, Oct. 15)‘WORLD ON FIRE’ The first season of this British series about ordinary people proving their mettle, or failing to prove it, in the various theaters of World War II was not the most sophisticated of melodramas. The return of Lesley Manville (after a four-year gap between seasons), as a bigoted Manchester woman coping with her son’s sudden acquisition of a Polish wife, makes up for a lot, though. (PBS, Oct. 15)‘THE AMERICAN BUFFALO’ For the first time, Ken Burns directs a documentary that is not about man or man’s accomplishments. (Well, the second time if you count “Not for Ourselves Alone,” the one among his three dozen projects as a director that focuses specifically on women.) But the four-hour series is equal parts human history and natural history, as it traces the intertwined fates of the bison and the tribes that depended on them. (PBS, Oct. 16)‘EVERYONE ELSE BURNS’ The CW slips a British comedy onto its menu of mostly Canadian series. Simon Bird of “The Inbetweeners” and Kate O’Flynn of “Landscapers” play the parents in a family that struggles with the strictures of their Christian sect, whose many no-nos include drinking coffee and celebrating birthdays. (CW, Oct. 16)Simon Bird and Kate O’Flynn star in “Everyone Else Burns,” a British import coming to the CW.James Stack/CW‘NEON’ Three friends portrayed by Tyler Dean Flores (who plays the singer), Emma Ferreira (the overbearing manager) and Jordan Mendoza (the social media geek) move to Miami in search of reggaeton stardom in a comedy whose executive producers include the Taylor Swift antagonist Scooter Braun. (Netflix, Oct. 19)‘WOLF LIKE ME’ This Australian dark comedy is a mix of rom-com and broken-family drama in which one character’s being a werewolf is both the classic impediment to true love and an all-purpose allegory of the need for safety in relationships. Its first season was slight, amusing and often moving. (Peacock, Oct. 19)‘30 COINS’ The Spanish director Álex de la Iglesia’s entertainingly lurid thriller about a demonic conspiracy focused on a small village gets a second season and a substantial new cast member, Paul Giamatti, who plays a mysterious American tech billionaire. (HBO, Oct. 23)‘LIFE ON OUR PLANET’ The creators of British series like “Planet Earth” and “Our Planet” join forces with Industrial Light and Magic and Steven Spielberg for a natural-history series about the ebb and flow of life across the eons, which provides copious opportunities for animating the 99 percent of earth’s species that have gone extinct. (Netflix, Oct. 25)‘FELLOW TRAVELERS’ Matt Bomer and Jonathan Bailey star as clandestine lovers in a nostalgic march-of-history mini-series — McCarthyism, Vietnam, disco, AIDS — written by Ron Nyswaner (“Philadelphia”), based on the novel of the same name by Thomas Mallon. (Paramount+, Oct. 27; Showtime, Oct. 29)‘THIS ENGLAND’ Hamlet and Hercule Poirot are all well and good, but here’s a real challenge for Kenneth Branagh: playing the Brexit-boosting, Covid-partying former prime minister of Britain, Boris Johnson, in a six-episode mini-series written by Michael Winterbottom and Kieron Quirke. (BritBox, Nov. 1)‘ALL THE LIGHT WE CANNOT SEE’ Steven Knight, creator of “Peaky Blinders,” developed this mini-series from Anthony Doerr’s Pulitzer-winning World War II romantic thriller about a brave, blind French girl and a German boy whose technical skills pull him into the Nazi army. Marie-Laure, the blind heroine, is played by Aria Mia Loberti, a Fulbright scholar, disability advocate and first-time actor; Marie-Laure’s father and great-uncle are played by the more seasoned Mark Ruffalo and Hugh Laurie. (Netflix, Nov. 2)Aria Mia Loberti, a first-time actor, stars in an adaptation of the novel “All the Light We Cannot See.”Katalin Vermes/Netflix‘LAWMEN: BASS REEVES’ Originally billed as yet another spinoff of “Yellowstone,” the latest show from the executive producer Taylor Sheridan is now an anthology series that will feature various real-life old-west lawmen. The first season stars David Oyelowo as Reeves, a formerly enslaved man who developed a formidable reputation as a deputy U.S. marshal. Lauren E. Banks plays Reeves’s wife and the cast includes Dennis Quaid, Donald Sutherland and Shea Whigham. (Paramount+, Nov. 5)‘THE BUCCANEERS’ “A group of fun-loving young American girls explode into the tightly corseted London season of the 1870s,” according to the press release, which sounds like a cross between “Downton Abbey” and a reality dating competition (never mind that it’s based on an unfinished Edith Wharton novel). (Apple TV+, Nov. 8)‘FOR ALL MANKIND’ Equal parts soap opera and engaging alt-history of the space race — you didn’t see the North Korean thing coming, did you? — “Mankind” jumps ahead another decade for its fourth season, with international partners uneasily working together to mine asteroids in 2003. (Apple TV+, Nov. 10)‘BELGRAVIA: THE NEXT CHAPTER’ Written by Julian Fellowes (“Downton Abbey”) and starring redoubtable British performers like Tamsin Greig and Harriet Walter, the mini-series “Belgravia,” about 1840s London society, was a distinct pleasure. This sequel jumps ahead 30 years and has a new cast and a new writer, Helen Edmundson (“Dalgliesh”). (MGM+, Nov. 12)‘PARIS POLICE 1905’ The first season of this historical police procedural — titled “Paris Police 1900” and set when the procedures we’re used to seeing were being invented — was handsomely produced, crazily plotted and consistently entertaining. The new season returns most of the cast (with the regrettable exception of Valérie Dashwood’s laudanum-sniffing, steel-nerved Mme. Lépine) and adds automobiles. (MHz Choice, Nov. 14)‘MONARCH: LEGACY OF MONSTERS’ Kurt Russell’s last regular role in a series was nearly 50 years ago, in the 1976 western “The Quest,” so kudos to Legendary Pictures and Apple for talking him into starring in their Godzilla-adjacent MonsterVerse mystery. It’s a package deal: Russell and his son Wyatt both play the central character, an Army officer somehow connected to kaiju research and development. That would seem to prevent them from appearing onscreen together, but we can always hope for a time warp. (Apple TV+, Nov. 17)‘SCOTT PILGRIM TAKES OFF’ Bryan Lee O’Malley’s graphic novels about a mopey Toronto bassist who is also, accidentally, a video-game warrior — already made into a 2010 film starring Michael Cera, “Scott Pilgrim vs. the World” — are now adapted into an anime series produced by the Japanese studio Science SARU. O’Malley is on board as a writer and showrunner. (Netflix, Nov. 17)‘FARGO’ After an underwhelming sojourn in 1950s Kansas City in its fourth season, Noah Hawley’s arch rural noir heads back north to Minnesota and North Dakota for a story starring Jon Hamm as a sheriff and Juno Temple as the woman he’s hunting for. The typically eclectic cast includes Dave Foley, Lamorne Morris and Jennifer Jason Leigh. (FX, Nov. 21)‘ECHO’ Like alien invaders sending out spores, Marvel series multiply on Disney+. This one — starring Alaqua Cox as the Native American hero who can perfectly mimic movement and Zahn McClarnon as her father — is an offshoot of “Hawkeye,” from 2021. But it lies closer to “Daredevil” in the Marvel narrative architecture, so Charlie Cox and Vincent D’Onofrio are also in the cast as Daredevil and the Kingpin. (Disney+, Nov. 29)December‘PERCY JACKSON AND THE OLYMPIANS’ Ten years after the second and, so far, final Percy Jackson film, Walker Scobell (he played Ryan Reynolds’s younger self in “The Adam Project”) takes on the role of the 12-year-old demigod in a new series. (Disney+, Dec. 20)Other returning shows: “American Horror Story” (FX, Sept. 20); “Starstruck” (Max, Sept. 28); “The Simpsons” (Fox, Oct. 1); “Family Guy” (Fox, Oct. 1); “Magnum P.I.” (NBC, Oct. 4); “Quantum Leap” (NBC, Oct. 4); “Creepshow” (Shudder, Oct. 13); “Hotel Portofino” (PBS, Oct. 15); “Bosch: Legacy” (Freevee, Oct. 20); “Upload” (Amazon Prime Video, Oct. 20); “Native America” (PBS, Oct. 24); “American Horror Stories” (FX on Hulu, Oct. 26); “Shoresy” (Hulu, Oct. 27); “The Gilded Age” (HBO, Oct. 29); “Invincible” (Amazon Prime Video, Nov. 3); “Rap Sh!t” (Max, Nov. 9); “Julia” (Max, Nov. 16); “Power Book III: Raising Kanan” (Starz, Dec. 1) More