In the opening pages of “The Buccaneers,” Edith Wharton’s novel about American heiresses of the 1870s looking to marry Englishmen with titles, Mrs. St. George, the mother of the central character, regards her daughter’s chances. “Nan, though certainly not a beauty like (her sister) Virginia, was going to be fascinating, and by the time her hair was put up, the St. George girls need fear no rivalry.”

Still, she worried. There was the daughter of an acquaintance named Lizzy Elmsworth, whose “dark eyebrows had a bolder curve, and Lizzy’s foot — ah, where in the world did an upstart Elmsworth get that arrogant step?”

Wharton’s wry sense of humor often defies adaptation, and that’s true of the Apple TV+ version of “The Buccaneers,” which attempts to infuse the series with a modern zestiness along the lines of: What if Edith Wharton, but “Gossip Girl”? It’s pushy at the outset, but gets better as it goes.

The show’s creator is Katherine Jakeways, a British actor with a slim resume of writing credits, but most involve comedy (including “Tracey Ullman’s Show”). It would have been fun to see some of those talents put to use here. But you can’t deny the show’s stylistic approach conveys just how vulgar or bewitching (take your pick) these rich and uninhibited late 19th-century Americans might have seemed to their buttoned-up hosts in England.

Some of the book’s plot points and details have been tweaked. And only a portion of the original has been adapted, paving the way for successive seasons. No problem there. The friends’ days are filled with flirtations and assignations and one secret lesbian affair. But marriage itself is no happy ending for anyone, complicated either by chilly in-laws or outright violence. The latter is portrayed with a deft understanding of how psychological manipulation plays out in abusive relationships.

But first, these daughters of America’s nouveau riche — the buccaneers of the title — wash ashore in London in search of prospective husbands whose declining aristocratic fortunes are in need of a cash infusion. The term of art at the time was “dollar princesses” — new money propping up the old elite. And if the pairing was a happy one, even better.

Everyone understood the game, each side hunting for the thing it lacked — be it money or social standing — and newspapers covered this phenomenon in a more entertaining and forthright manner than the show itself. A real wedding announcement from 1903 ran with the headline “She has landed her duke” and noted that “the new duchess is slight, dark and attractive. It is an exaggeration to say that she is strikingly handsome, as many have done. Two cynical society men were discussing the point and one of them said: ‘Would you call her face handsome?’ ‘Not exactly — but her fortune is,’ said the other.” Society reporters had zingers!

Apple’s version of “The Buccaneers” attempts its own sort of playfulness.

Nan (Kristine Froseth) is the youngest of the debutantes and an independent thinker who’s unimpressed by titles and even less so by marriage. Naturally this draws the attention of a duke (Guy Remmers). They meet cute when they emerge from the sea after a brisk swim, each assuming they had the beach all to themselves. He’s barechested. She’s unflustered.

Contrast that with Colin Firth in a wet shirt as Mr. Darcy in the 1995 adaptation of Jane Austen’s “Pride and Prejudice.” The moment is famous because it’s sexy — he’s both covered but revealed, creating a frisson of excitement that challenged the starchy norms of the era. “The Buccaneers” doesn’t have an instinct for that kind of sensual subtly.

Even so, the cast is strong, if likely unfamiliar to most viewers in the U.S., the lone exception being “Mad Men’s” Christina Hendricks as Nan’s mother. Amelia Bullmore (so good in “Scott & Bailey”) plays the duke’s mother with an intriguing blend of imperiousness and human-scaled wit. And Froseth’s Nan feels like a three-dimensional person who has been asked to grow up quickly, left to figure out her future absent guidance from anyone free of ulterior motives. Much as I resisted the series initially, the latter episodes take on an emotional resonance that won me over. The novel was last adapted by the BBC in 1995 starring Carla Gugino as Nan. Ultimately Apple’s version has more depth.

The colorblind casting brushes past anything so gauche as racism, except when a character abruptly raises the issue, only to abandon the topic just as quickly. Like so many period dramas, that evasiveness feels less about creating a cozy storytelling environment (plenty of other ugly things happen) than finding the topic too uncomfortable to grapple with altogether.

Cheeky anachronisms abound. The costumes are accurate-ish, the dialogue less so. The girls are single and ready to mingle, woo-hooing as they clink their Champagne glasses. But the writing just sort of sits there, like dough that refuses to rise. Are they vivacious or annoying? Maybe both.

Sofia Coppola deployed a similar approach in 2006′s “Marie Antoinette,” but was more circumspect about how she used pop music to suggest a world legible to modern sensibilities: Of a teenager who wants to party. “The Buccaneers” feels effortful by comparison.

The series calms down as it goes, growing in storytelling confidence and laying off its inner “Gossip Girl,” and the production design is first-rate, from a garden maze made out of hedges to scenes at a massive country estate during Christmas.

Wharton wrote fiction, but her novels function as insider accounts of the late 19th- and early 20th-century upper classes — as well as those climbing in, or falling out.

But like HBO’s “The Gilded Age” and Netflix’s “Bridgerton,” the show never considers how all that wealth was accumulated, and the suffering it required from others. Instead of framing these shows as escapism, maybe it’s worth thinking about what it means to find comfort in stories about the richest of the rich.

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‘THE BUCCANEERS’

2.5 stars (out of 4)

Rating: TV-14

How to watch: Apple TV+

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©2023 Chicago Tribune. Visit chicagotribune.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

CHICAGO — Before David “Davey” Bauer made history at Northwestern Medicine for a double lung transplant assisted by a pair of DD breast implants, he considered himself a fairly healthy guy.

Bauer, 34, spent his hours off from his landscaping job in De Soto, Missouri — near St. Louis — golfing, snowboarding and skateboarding. Cigarettes, he thought, were the only negative. A former smoker who went through a pack a day for four years, Bauer switched to vaping in 2014.

“I thought it seemed like a safer alternative,” Bauer said. “In hindsight, it seems like I should have just quit sooner … it’s not good to inhale anything in your lungs, other than oxygen, obviously.”

So when Bauer entered an urgent care clinic outside of St. Louis in April with the flu, he expected to recover fast.

“They were just like, ‘He’s got the flu, there’s a little bit of pneumonia in his lungs, here’s a Z-Pak, you’re good to go,’” Susan Gore, Bauer’s girlfriend of seven years, said at a news conference Wednesday. “And the next day he couldn’t walk.”

The flu had turned into a lung infection resistant to antibiotics. On April 17, Bauer entered the intensive care unit at Saint Louis University Hospital. He was moved onto a ventilator, then into a medically induced coma.

SLU Hospital refused to perform a lung transplant, saying Bauer was too sick to survive. After the hospital called the Northwestern Medicine Canning Thoracic Institute, Gore and Bauer relocated to Chicago in late May.

Bauer’s surgery was “uncharted territory” for the program, said Dr. Rade Tomic, medical director of the Northwestern Medicine Canning Thoracic Institute Lung Transplant Program.

“We knew that to get him listed (for a transplant), we had to resolve the infection,” Tomic said. “The only way to resolve the infection was actually taking the lungs out.”

The surgical team removed Bauer’s infected lungs and cleaned out his chest cavity. To keep his body alive without lungs, the team needed to create channels for blood to flow in and out of his heart, said Dr. Ankit Bharat, chief of thoracic surgery and director of the Canning Thoracic Institute.

That’s where a pair of DD breast implants came in.

“We needed something to support his heart, and the DD breast implants seemed to be the perfect fit,” Bharat said Wednesday, as Bauer and Gore exchanged grins. “And frankly, they were the biggest we could get at the time.”

With Bauer’s heart stabilized between the implants, surgeons created an artificial lung outside Bauer’s body. The thoracic surgery team collaborated with plastic surgeons for a “crash course” on working with breast implants.

After the fact, Bauer said he was able to laugh at his clinical cleavage, adopting the nickname “Double-D Davey.”

“I didn’t know much of it until after the fact,” Bauer said Wednesday. “I thought it was awesome. Kind of funny.”

“I was like, ‘You get boob implants, but I don’t?’” Gore quipped.

Bauer was soon well enough to be listed for a double lung transplant. Two new lungs were available within 24 hours, and both were installed May 28, at which point the implants were removed.

“I feel so blessed,” Bauer said. “I mean, it’s incredible. I got a second chance at life.”

Bauer’s successful surgery was buoyed not only by the implants, but by good luck, Bharat said. It’s rare that two healthy lungs become available within 24 hours, and keeping Bauer stable between procedures — not to mention restarting his heart — was complicated.

Bharat had expected that the temporary circulation system, with Bauer’s heart nestled between the breast implants, could keep him alive for about a month.

“We were really surprised how fast he recovered once we took out his infected lungs,” Bharat said.

Bharat hopes the procedure can be used again in the future to stabilize people who need a lung transplant, but are too sick to receive new organs immediately.

“This is the first time, certainly, this technique was used,” Bharat said. “It has taught us a lot and hopefully can be used for other patients.”

Bauer was placed on dialysis while he recovered, and developed foot drop, a nerve compression impacting the movement of his foot. He also had myocarditis in the lining of his heart, and still speaks through a tracheostomy tube in his throat.

Still, Bauer is expected to make a full recovery — though he says he will never vape again.

“I feel a lot more like myself before all of this,” Bauer said. “I’m getting better every day.”

Tomic hopes that Bauer’s experience discourages patients from seeing vaping as a healthy substitute for cigarettes.

“We know that vaping can cause injury to the lungs, and also that flu can cause fatal outcomes, life-threatening infections,” Tomic said.

Bauer was discharged from Northwestern Memorial Hospital in late September. He will remain in Chicago for another year in outpatient care.

A fundraiser supporting Bauer’s recovery has raised just over $34,000 to date.

Bauer said he misses watching the St. Louis Cardinals play at Busch Stadium. He and Gore have settled in River North for the time being, though, with dogs Penny and Bear.

“Home is where the heart is, and this is my heart,” Gore said. “So, this is where he is, and this is where we are.”

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©2023 Chicago Tribune. Visit chicagotribune.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

“Killers of the Flower Moon” is not short, nor should it be. At 3 hours, 26 minutes, it casts a spell, dark and mournful but alive.

It may look like a certain kind of movie epic, especially as the trailers market it. But director/co-screenwriter Martin Scorsese’s cinematic lament for the Osage Nation during the oil boom in Oklahoma a century ago — when dozens of wealthy Osage were being murdered before the newly created FBI took an interest — relies on quiet, tense exchanges behind closed doors. This isn’t a triumphal story. It’s a story of greed, racism and harsh 20th-century history.

Would the movie work better, and attract bigger audiences, especially in the 50-year-old bladder demographic, with an intermission?

A handful of U.S. movie theater exhibitors recently went rogue and put in their own intermission — and then retracted it on orders from the “Killer of the Flower Moon” backers Apple Original Films in collaboration with Paramount. (Apple is testing a distribution partnership with Paramount, among others, akin to Amazon’s deal with Warner Bros.)

Scorsese didn’t make the movie with an intermission in mind. He didn’t love having someone else decide where one should go, even if it’s by customer demand or a theater operator’s presumption that three-and-a-half hours will be an easier sell with a break.

“Flower Moon” editor Thelma Schoonmaker, Scorsese’s longtime colleague, had two words for British newspaper The Standard regarding the intermissioning of their picture: “not right.”

Others argue for the option to offer moviegoers a break if they want it, or the uninterrupted film if they prefer that.

Says Tim Richards, founder and CEO of Vue International, a privately owned cinema chain in Europe, the U.K. and Taiwan: “‘Killers of the Flower Moon’ is an extraordinary experience. And I would hate for anyone to not see it simply because they were concerned about sitting in one spot without a comfort break for three and a half hours.”

In his U.K. cinemas for the first week of release, Richards offered his customers both options, one with an intermission inserted at the 1-hour, 42-minute mark, well before the FBI shows up, the other without, as Scorsese intended it. Richards is cagey about details, and who sanctioned the intermission option for a week. But now, he says, that’s that. “The filmmakers, together with the studio” called it off.

Meantime several other Vue territories, including those in Germany, Italy and the Netherlands, continue to offer approved intermissions in “Flower Moon.” Those countries have long-established moviegoing traditions, and the wine or beer or soda and popcorn break at halftime remains a must for the customer base. Length often has nothing to do with it; two-hour movies often come with an intermission, however smoothly or awkwardly inserted.

Richards recalls trying to “reintroduce the intermission starting a few years ago with one of the “Pirates of the Caribbean” movies, which range from 135 to 165 minutes. The third, “Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End” really did feel the end of the world. Running times can be deceptive. Many moviegoers, including me, and including Richards, feel “Flower Moon” develops at a masterly pace, not nervous but not static, that belies its length.

Once upon a time in America, most movies of a certain duration, especially in their “road show” extra-long big city engagements at higher prices, embraced the intermission concept from the get-go. Filmmakers wanted all the bells and whistles: the overture; the intermission with intermission music; the entr’acte music; the exit music. It was an event.

Films of the requisite length and sweep didn’t necessarily build up to the intermission break with a huge action sequence. “Lawrence of Arabia” (1962) might’ve culminated pre-intermission with Peter O’Toole on horseback with thousands of extras in the desert. Instead (and very shrewdly), it comes to its intermission with a simple walk-and-talk, with Jack Hawkins referring to O’Toole’s Lawrence: “That poor devil. He’s riding the whirlwind.” To which Claude Rains, intimating danger and colonialist doom ahead, says: “Let’s hope we’re not.” Intermission! Cue the Maurice Jarre theme!

Other epics of the early ‘60s, such as “Spartacus,” build to a rousing note of what’s next? In “Spartacus” Kirk Douglas, leading the slave revolt against the Roman Empire, promises to “smash every army they send against us!” Cue the Alex North music! Yes! The moment works. It’s hardly the best moment in the movie, but it’s the right time to pay the water bill, if you know what I mean.

I grew up in the waning era of un-ironic intermission movies, which were getting scarce by then. (Funniest ever: The eight-second intermission during the Bridge of Death crossing in “Monty Python and the Holy Grail.”) Curious about how “Flower Moon” would feel cut in half, so to speak, I saw it again the other night. Around the 102-minute mark, I kept an eye out for the probable intermission point Vue cinemas overseas were offering their customers as an option.

And you know? I couldn’t find any natural break around that point in Scorsese’s film. Storywise, you could do better with the arrival of Jesse Plemons’ FBI agent, but that’s a fair bit later. The entire film defies an obvious intermission at midpoint, because it’s about a fever dream that never breaks.

Vue’s Richards agrees: “There’s nowhere where you think ‘I can make a run for the bathoom.’ That’s a film that holds you. No big crescendos, no peaks and valleys. But that’s exactly why someone who needs a comfort break might struggle with the decision to see the film without an intermission.”

The problem is, Scorsese didn’t think about his movie any other way, at any point. Richards, on the other hand, says he got “more than 80% support” for the intermission option. And he believes, he says, in giving customers a choice, especially with the average length of movies increasing by 30 minutes over the last decade — and “with cinema operators in some instances really struggling. Recovery has been a lot slower than expected. But the studios, our partners, have made a commitment to cinemas … that’s unprecedented.”

I’d love to live in a movie world, if we continue to support one, where large, ambitious films of all kinds rediscover the pleasure and tradition of the intentional, filmmaker-driven interval, strategically placed in the service of the story. “Flower Moon” wasn’t one of those films, because the director didn’t make it that way. So be it, says Richards, who says it’s simply “all about choice.” Whose choice, exactly, well … that’s a matter to be settled, or at least continued, after intermission.

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(Michael Phillips is the Chicago Tribune film critic.)

©2023 Chicago Tribune. Visit chicagotribune.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

CHICAGO — Henry Winkler’s smile is the smile of an old friend seeing you for the first time in years, or a smile of sincere affection for an unexpected new friend, or a smile that nudges into a laugh. It’s a smile so warm and real that you hate yourself for wondering how any human can generate such feeling, a dozen times a day, for 50 years of public life.

And yet, there was that smile again, at 8 in the morning, in suburban Rosemont.

You see it in a hotel Starbucks, where Winkler commands a small crowd despite the hour; they stare in awe of him, as if a 12-point buck just wandered in. You see it over breakfast in a hotel restaurant, which, for Winkler, means a sip of coffee, a taste of food, then a stranger approaching cautiously to ask for a picture, telling him he was their entire childhood, again and again. You see it waiting for a table at the hostess counter.

A long slender man in jogging clothes turned offhandedly and noticed Winkler and turned back in a double take and interrupted what Winkler was saying and exclaimed:

“Henry!”

“Oh! Kiefer! Hello!” Winkler replied to Kiefer Sutherland, who, like Winkler, was also in town for a few days, doing one of those fan convention autograph marathon gauntlets. They chatted a bit and Sutherland apologized for “Ground Control,” a 1998 film with Sutherland and Winkler in a small role — there’s a good reason you’ve never heard of it.

Winkler waved off the apology, and they agreed to plan to catch up soon. “‘Ground Control,’” Winkler said to me later, “worst movie made by a human being. But look at that — Kiefer Sutherland! A lovely actor. I am so excited by that!”

Winkler understands the effect he has on people, yet wholeheartedly reserves the right to gush over others, all the time. In his new memoir, “Being Henry: The Fonz… and Beyond,” he writes about meeting Joaquin Phoenix once at the Screen Actors Guild Awards and Phoenix said, “I can’t believe I’m meeting you,” and Winkler replied, “You can’t believe you’re meeting me?” To the hostess, he said: “How are you? Lots of obstetricians in the hotel today.”

“Opticians,” she corrected. “But so nice to see you.”

“I’m Henry,” he said.

“Well, yes… I know,” she said. “Having a good time in Chicago?”

“Unbelievable time,” he said, big smile.

At our table, the waiter asked if Winkler would like coffee. Winkler asked where the man is from. Bangladesh, the man said. “Nice!” Winkler said.

“Far away,” the man said.

“And the flooding,” Winkler added.

“Right now, yes.”

“Your family is fine?”

“My family is here!”

“Oh, well — good!”

On and on like that, all day long. Winkler’s voice carries a melodious New York City working-class lack of presumption and flows without many staccato thoughts or half-completed sentences, and almost never ends with a negative thought. Years ago, he told himself to never let a negative idea sit in his head. “Remove it any way you can,” he told me, “‘I don’t have time for you,’ ‘I don’t want you in my life,’ and that changes your whole countenance, then you get to be here, having breakfast, this morning, right now.”

In fact, though I would normally never write this about a famous person, should you see Winkler in public — and he will be in Chicago this week, for his book release and a sold-out appearance at the Chicago Humanities Festival — you should introduce yourself. He actually likes meeting new people. When we met for breakfast, he said he just ran into Christie Brinkley’s agent, “who was at William Morris when I started. I met a woman at the medical convention at the hotel. And a woman who started law school at 50. I met a doctor whose 9-year-old daughter is like me, dyslexic. That was just at Starbucks.”

A woman approached our table and said, smiling, “Oh my God!”

“I’m Henry,” he said.

“And I am shaking,” she said. “All these opticians … does Henry Winkler need glasses?”

“I do!”

“Nice to meet you! I’ll see what I can do!”

Fame has not always been like this, but since the mid-1970s, it’s often been like this. In his memoir, he describes a publicity event in Dallas for “Happy Days,” the TV series that made him as culturally ubiquitous during the 1970s as disco and “Star Wars.” He was there with his co-stars, Ron Howard, Donny Most, Anson Williams, when a crowd of 20,000 blocked their limo. He had made a rule for himself to never summon the tough-guy cool of his character, Fonzie, but here, as Fonzie, he yelled: “You are going to part like the Red Sea!” Then, not unlike how Fonzie controlled electronics with the bump of a fist, the crowd parted — until one teen, watching Winkler closely, yelled, “He’s so short!”

Winkler wheeled around: “(Expletive) you, I’m not short.”

Henry Winkler is nice but he is not made of wood. He told me, “I went with instinct. Ron and everyone were scared. It gets claustrophobic. But I’m dyslexic, I go with instinct.”

These days, when he’s recognized by anyone younger than Generation X, it’s for being in Adam Sandler flicks; for being murdered in the first “Scream” movie; for playing Dr. Lu Saperstein on “Parks and Recreation” (he delivered most of the cast’s fictional babies); for playing administrator Sy Mittleman on the cult comedy “Children’s Hospital”; for playing Barry Zuckerkorn, the worst lawyer alive on “Arrested Development.” And of course, for embodying a needy, has-been acting coach on HBO’s “Barry,” the role that finally, in 2018, after a few acting nominations across many years, landed him an Emmy.

Indeed, those are the poles of his creative life — “Happy Days” at one end, “Barry” at the other, separated by 45 years, many forgettable TV movies and the pang of typecasting. He began playing Fonzie in his mid-20s and left the role when he was in his mid-30s. He’s 77 now. He says that when “Happy Days” was canceled, he didn’t have a plan B.

For decades he feared he’d been typecast beyond employment. He became a curious kind of cultural royalty, indelible, endearing, but without a vast, austere body of work. That can be hard for an actor who made it the through Yale University’s School of Drama. Some actors recede into roles. It took Winkler a long time to acknowledge that whomever he plays, the Fonz lurks. He embodied the Fonz so completely that there’s a statue in downtown Milwaukee, the Bronze Fonz; it’s not a statue of Winkler, yet it is. There’s a lot that’s bad about that, but also, these days, a bunch that’s good. In the past decade, the Fonz became a layer to Winkler’s roles, there but no longer the only thing there. He notes a smidge of who he was — and the recognition that an audience knows.

“It took me until now to do the TV I’m doing,” he said. “I couldn’t have done something like ‘Barry’ back then. I was not authentic — to be perfectly honest. I knew who I thought I should be but I am only now comfortable with who I am. And it is so frustrating that it’s taken me 40 years. All the cliches: ‘I wish I knew then,’ ‘I wasted time.’ It was wonderful then, but I am so neurotic the best times were marred by the angst of who I wasn’t yet.”

At the peak of his fame in the late 1970s, he turned down the role of Danny Zuko in the film version of “Grease.” He didn’t want to be typecast as a greaser. Today, he said, “I would just see it as work and I would do it.” But it stings. He turned down the part and went home and had a ginger ale, he said. “John Travolta went home and bought a 747.”

The woman who asked about eyeglasses returned to our table. She had put down her coffee, forgot it, the cup got cold. “Well, now you don’t have to blow,” Winkler said.

“Haven’t heard that in a while,” the woman said with a wink.

Winkler slapped the table, laughed and turned to me: “Now did you think that would come out of that woman? Make people comfortable, you learn so much about them!”

He asks strangers where they are from, what they did before they do what they do now. He is friendly but speedy and grimly serious when asked about acting. Any fleeting hint of annoyance gets softened with verbal word balloons like “Yowie!” and “Holy moly!” And when strangers talk to him, their faces soften, they stare, because, though the word “iconic” gets abused, Winkler is so iconic, if you were a kid in the 1970s, he was not a man but a plastic doll, a T-shirt, a magazine cover, a board game and a lunch box.

The irony being, the man is more interesting, a paradox of resolve and timidity.

His parents were Jewish refugees of Nazi Germany, and as his book makes clear, tyrannical toward him, and he was not a fan of either of them. He has since co-authored, with Lin Oliver, more than three dozen children’s books, most with strong empowerment themes, including the popular Hank Zipzer stories about a dyslexic child. But for a long time — until recently — he saw himself as second-rate. As a young actor in Hollywood in 1973, he worked out of a friend’s office to use the phone and scrounge for acting jobs, sometimes pretending to be speaking to agents, so he didn’t look like a failure. Yet he was auditioning for Fonzie only a month after moving to Los Angeles.

“I was defined by working,” he told me. “I didn’t have enough self to wait and quell the anxiety. I was nobody, I was nothing, and I grew only half an inch with every new job.”

Still, despite being a young actor offered a big break, he had the self-worth to insist Fonzie show vulnerability, and even sadness, before accepting the role. In an early Christmas episode, Fonzie is caught in a lie by his surrogate family the Cunninghams: He insists he has family to spend the holiday with, then they find him home alone, cooking for one. But as the character became a monolith, ennui was quickly abandoned for a near-paranormal control of jukeboxes and, infamously, the ability to jump sharks. Even his catchphrase, “Ayyyyyy,” was less organic than a response to Jimmie Walker and “Good Times” turning “DY-NO-MITE” into stiff competition for “Happy Days.”

As his star rose, family cashed in with quickie paperbacks. Yale — initially snotty toward his sitcom work — asked for money. Most painfully, being Fonzie meant becoming an albatross to coworkers who lived in the shadow of his wingspan. Read any “Happy Days”-related memoir and they all say the same: They loved Henry but they hated the focus on Fonzie. ABC wanted to rename the show “Fonzie’s Happy Days” and when Christmas came, the network gave the entire cast wallets — except Winkler, who got the latest home tech, a VCR. “I found out from Ron how he felt,” Winkler said. “I remember thinking how stupid I was. How insensitive! It was ultimately great for him because that treatment became the impetus to become a director. And to change the name! People would be hurt. An acting ensemble like that depends on keeping cohesion at all costs.”

Decades later, Winkler is so attuned to the shifting fortunes of fame and acting that, as he writes in his book, he has a small speech ready to capitalize on his name, should he lose everything: “I could roll up to somebody’s house and say, ‘Hi, it’s Henry Winkler, I know this is crazy, but do you have leftovers?’ … I have literally plotted out that scenario.”

When our breakfast ended, we stood and Christopher Lloyd approached Winker and hugged him. Then the great character actor Danny Trejo approached. Random as this sounds, it’s not when you’re Henry Winkler. Everyone took pictures with him. Next, a mother and son. Then a stranger walked by and said: “I love your outfit!” Winkler, wearing lime green pants and a bright plaid sports jacket, replied: “I love color!”

The more he did this, greeting friends and strangers — a kind of receiving line that never ends — the more I assumed he was schooled in improv. He dabbled. But what Second City does, he told me, no way. He once got on stage at an improv night with “Parks and Recreation” co-star Ben Schwartz and “I was so far over my head. We were on different continents. He’s brilliant, and I wanted to know how to melt into the wall.”

There, another paradox: Two of his best moments as an actor were improvised. In his first “Arrested Development” episode, he surreptitiously nudges pastries into his briefcase. In his best movie, “Night Shift,” in 1982, directed by Ron Howard, co-starring Michael Keaton, Winkler runs out of cash and change for an insistent subway saxophone player and begins writing checks. Both of those bits were unscripted.

Winkler works best in the moment.

The next morning, at the autograph convention, I found him in front of his table at least 40 minutes before he was scheduled. Every other famous name — Susan Sarandon across from him, Peter “RoboCop” Weller beside him — sat behind their tables, receiving fans during set hours. Winkler stood and approached each fan in turn. His line was never the longest, but it was the steadiest, and his smile was definitely the biggest.

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©2023 Chicago Tribune. Visit at chicagotribune.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

Since opening in 2017, Mi Tocaya Antojeria has become one of Chicago’s most acclaimed Mexican restaurants, picking up a Bib Gourmand from Michelin and earning chef Diana Dávila a couple of James Beard Award nominations for Best Chef: Great Lakes.

If anything, I think the restaurant is still underrated. Here you’ll find food like nowhere else in the country, as Dávila draws inspiration from traditional Mexican dishes while incorporating Midwestern ingredients and a sprinkling of fine-dining finesse. So it might surprise you to learn that one dish that has been a fixture since the beginning is a straightforward-sounding steak burrito.

The burrito in question even has lettuce in it, which is apparently a very contentious addition. Any time I post a photo of a burrito containing lettuce on social media, I receive messages from concerned commenters across this fair country, including an astonishing number from California. Didn’t I realize that lettuce wilts into mush inside a hot burrito? What kind of criminal would do such a thing?

When I asked Dávila about lettuce possibly being a contentious burrito addition, she not only disagreed but doubled down. “Actually, I’m an extra lettuce person,” Dávila said. “I like the crunch, and I think it tastes really good.” Her only caveat is that burritos with lettuce should be eaten immediately. Never get one delivered.

The lettuce-loaded burrito on Mi Tocaya’s menu also has a special significance for Dávila because it’s a nod to the one served at her parents’ south suburban taqueria. She lavished special attention on Mi Tocaya’s version, marinating the meat in beer and crafting her own umami-packed seasoning blend. “I also added double steak because I remember these guys who would always come in and order extra meat,” Dávila said. This also helps explain why the steak burrito at Mi Tocaya costs $25.60; it can feed two exceptionally hungry people.

But she also wanted it to look and taste like burritos usually do in Chicago, which meant keeping the standard fillings. “I feel like a Chicago burrito pretty much always has beans, lettuce, cheese and tomato,” Dávila said. “I took out the tomato, but the rest is there.”

The burrito breakdown

Beans, lettuce, cheese and tomato are the most common burrito fillings in Chicago, and I have the data to back it up.

I did what any rational person would do and created a spreadsheet, looked up 100 Mexican restaurants known for their burritos and cataloged all the fillings that came standard with an order. (Obviously, you can personalize your burrito order, discarding the beans and adding triple lettuce if you so desire, but I was interested in what came automatically.)

The majority of burritos I examined featured refried beans (69/100), lettuce (75/100), cheese (75/100) and tomato (69/100), with sour cream (55/100) slightly behind. One finding that particularly jumped out to me was that only 12 of the 100 restaurants automatically include rice.

So why were all the Californians irate about lettuce if it’s such a common component? After all, you’ll find romaine lettuce at national burrito chains like Chipotle and Qdoba.

What was left to do but create another absurdly long spreadsheet? This time I logged the standard burrito fillings across the country by picking five to 10 of the most popular burrito restaurants in the largest cities in the United States. Since I couldn’t eat in all of these places, I relied on a mix of recommendations from local newspaper articles, Eater lists and social media sites like Yelp and TripAdvisor. (In a dream world, someone would pay me to eat burritos across the country, but until that magical day, this will have to do.)

The results were surprising. Standard burrito fillings change dramatically across the country. While there are exceptions everywhere, in general, the farther north one moves from our southern border, the more ingredients join the party. Both El Paso, Texas, and Phoenix contain numerous burrito spots where fillings are mostly shunned in favor of saucy stewed dishes like chicharron en salsa verde and chile Colorado. (For the record, I adore this stripped-down style.)

Perhaps no state showcases how much standard burrito fillings can vary than California. Down in San Diego many of the burritos lack both rice and beans, favoring cheese, sour cream and, perhaps most surprising to outsiders, french fries. (This is often called a California burrito.) Head north to Los Angeles, and beans now seem to be a requirement, though rice isn’t. By the time you reach San Francisco, the burritos almost always have beans and rice, with many restaurants layering on cheese, sour cream, avocado, cilantro and onion.

But one ingredient that is tough to find in all three cities is lettuce. This is true for other West Coast cities like Seattle and Portland. Lettuce shows up very occasionally in Texas’ two largest cities, Houston and Dallas. The only other places where lettuce popped up semi-regularly were Philadelphia, New York City and Washington, D.C., cities not exactly known for their burrito-making prowess. (Oddly, if you keep moving up the East Coast, lettuce seems to disappear in Boston.)

I should stop here to relate that there are so many exceptions that I could spend all day pointing them out. La Taqueria, the most acclaimed burrito spot in San Francisco, doesn’t add rice, and in Phoenix, you can find burritos stuffed with rice and beans.

Even in Chicago, there’s a surprising amount of variety. Both La Pasadita and Carbon Live Fire Mexican Grill’s steak burrito comes with nothing else but onions and cilantro. There’s not even a smear of refried beans. It’s also getting extremely easy to find California burritos, the french-fry-stuffed style most popular in San Diego, thanks to places like Diego, Jarabe, Cruz Blanca and Invicto. It was even the October special at Big Star.

Plus, while Chicago isn’t anywhere near the Mexican border, some of my favorite burritos come from restaurants that are looking to the cuisine of Northern Mexican states like Sonora and Durango. Visit Gorditas La Tia Susy, Gordillas and Taqueria El Duranguito and you’ll find flour tortillas smeared with maybe a bit of refried beans but that’s it. (These three places also make their flour tortillas from scratch, which is another reason why I prefer this style.) Even if you hate lettuce, there’s a burrito in Chicago for you.

But is lettuce really that bad? I used to be 100% against the inclusion, agreeing that lettuce wilts into mush next to hot carne asada or carnitas. After chatting with Dávila, I’ve had a change of heart. One peculiarity is that there does seem to be a minimum amount of lettuce required. If only a small handful is added, the lettuce is no match for the hot meat. But if added in the right quantity, lettuce adds an undeniable cooling crunch.

Visit a burrito institution like El Faro in suburban Summit, and you’ll find a constant stream of people pouring in to grab a bulging burrito that costs less than $10. It looks comically oversize, but instead of an overwhelming heap of beef, there’s a balance of beans, lettuce, tomato and cheese. Each bite is creamy, juicy, salty, cooling, savory and, thanks to some potent salsa, very spicy.

The Chicago-style burrito may not be particularly trendy at the moment, and as other styles of burritos gain traction, it might wane even more. It certainly isn’t my preferred style (do I have to explain again how much I love the Northern Mexican style?) but for many people who were raised in Chicagoland, a burrito stuffed to the breaking point with meat, beans, lettuce, tomato and cheese will always hold a special significance.

nkindelsperger@chicagotribune.com

©2023 Chicago Tribune. Visit chicagotribune.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

Bob Goldberg, CEO of the Chicago-based National Association of Realtors, resigned Thursday, more than a year before his expected departure.

The announcement follows reported allegations of sexual harassment at NAR, which led to the resignation of former NAR President Kenny Parcell and staff members calling for executives including Goldberg to resign in September.

It also comes days after a federal jury in Missouri ruled NAR and several large real estate brokerages would have to pay $1.8 billion in damages after finding they conspired to artificially inflate the commissions of real estate agents, a decision that could significantly change the business of home buying and selling. NAR has said it plans to appeal the case.

Goldberg announced in June that he would retire at the end of 2024, having served as CEO since 2017. NAR is the nation’s largest trade association and has more than 1.5 million members.

“After announcing my decision to retire earlier this year, and as I reflected on my 30 years at NAR, I determined last month that now is the right time for this extraordinary organization to look to the future,” Goldberg said in a news release announcing the leadership changes.

Mantill Williams, the association’s vice president of communications, told the Tribune in a phone interview Thursday that Goldberg’s resignation was planned prior to the court ruling on Tuesday and did not have to do with the harassment allegations against Parcell.

Nykia Wright, former CEO of the Chicago Sun-Times, has been appointed as the interim CEO of the organization while the association continues its search for a permanent replacement.

Wright stepped down in January following the newspaper’s merger with public radio station WBEZ-FM 91.5 and transformation into a nonprofit under Chicago Public Media. Wright started as chief operating officer at the Sun-Times in 2017 and was named CEO the following year.

NAR President Tracy Kasper said the organization is “delighted” to have Wright as the interim CEO and highlighted Goldberg’s time at the association.

“We are immensely grateful for Bob’s leadership and decades-long service to NAR,” Kasper said. “It has been a privilege to work with him in expanding and strengthening our organization, and we congratulate him on his well-deserved retirement. His contributions to our association and our industry have been tremendous.”

ekane@chicagotribune.com

©2023 Chicago Tribune. Visit chicagotribune.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

I do not know Matt Singer, the author of “Opposable Thumbs: How Siskel & Ebert Changed Movies Forever,” which was published Oct. 24 and which the Tribune’s Michael Phillips recently praised, calling it “a good story, told adroitly and often movingly.”

To a point, that assessment is true. But I wanted more. And that’s my problem.

Again, I do not know Singer but I knew Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert (and worked and socialized with both), as well as many of the other people who played parts both prominent and minor in the lives of this remarkable pair, and who pepper the 352 pages of this book.

Singer told Phillips that as he was preparing to present his literary agent with a proposal, he “looked back at Ebert’s memoir and thought: That’s a great book. But there are only three chapters on Siskel and Ebert. So maybe there’s room for a book like mine to exist.”

That “maybe” convinced Singer’s agent and G.P. Putnam’s Sons, which published the book. It has 12 chapters, in addition to an introduction and epilogue. It is filled with many of the details of the television phenomenon that paired Ebert of the Sun-Times and Siskel of the Chicago Tribune on TV shows reviewing movies.

Under a number of different titles (the first being “Opening Soon at a Theater Near You”), the show was hugely influential, making the unlikely pair rich and famous. Singer energetically attempts to get behind the myths, suppositions and theories in trying to explain how this happened. He interviews scores of people, the majority of whom were involved with the productions of the shows.

And so we get this, as Singer writes, “Disagreements over the pronunciation of foreign filmmakers’ names were not uncommon on the set … but they typically escalated into all-out fights. Among the show’s crew, Gene and Roger’s dispute over the pronunciation of the word gauntlet is legendary — even though, to this author’s knowledge, there is only one correct pronunciation of ‘gauntlet’.”

There is, I fear, no way to fully explain what made Ebert and Siskel work, though there is much to be gained in Ebert’s “Life Itself: A Memoir,” published in 2011. It is a wonderful book, a masterpiece of the self-reflective kind, much of it mined from the blog he had started years before.

As he writes, ”I didn’t intend for (my blog) to drift into autobiography, but in blogging there is a tidal drift that pushes you that way. Some of these words, since rewritten and expanded, first appeared in blog form. Most are here for the first time. They come pouring forth in a flood of relief.”

Ebert has been gone since his death in 2013. Siskel died in 1999. So neither of them are available to offer their famous thumbs in reference to Singer’s book.

I remember that Time magazine film critic Richard Corliss once described their show as “a sitcom about two guys who lived in a movie theater.” And Singer does offer an interesting story, told to him by Ebert’s widow Chaz, about some TV executives having actually floated the notion of a sitcom based on fictional versions of the two critics or a show on which they would “play” themselves. Either of these thank-god-they-never-were-made efforts would have been titled “Best Enemies.”

Chaz Ebert is a valuable source for the book, as is Siskel’s widow Marlene Iglitzen. I know and like both women and wish they had been prodded to say more about the nature and character of the men they loved.

Longtime media critic Robert Feder has some incisive observations here, as does Richard Roeper, who had a lengthy television seat next to Ebert. Phillips too has some good words and thoughts to share. After Roger lost his voice after surgeries, my voice was used to read Ebert’s words in televised reviews, as was that of his friend, Bill Kurtis. We were both honored to do so.

We are minor players to be sure. But lots of memories poured forth after reading Singer’s book, which compelled me to rewatch Steve James’ intimate documentary based on Ebert’s memoir and with heart wrenching access to some of Ebert’s final days.

I also reread my obituaries of both men, and another about Tim Weigel, who had been Siskel’s roommate freshman year at Yale and who also, in one of the most haunting coincidences I have ever encountered, also died of a brain malady in 2001.

I suppose in doing all of this, I was attempting to do what Singer set out to do, to explain the magic that was Siskel and Ebert. As does he, I failed, realizing that perhaps some mysteries have no explanation. Perhaps some mysteries are miracles.

Something Ebert had to say when I called him for comment for the obituary I was writing about Siskel in the wake of his death, so untimely at age 53, came back to me: “I remember after we first started out and we were on a talk show and this old actor Buddy Rogers said to us, ‘The trouble with you guys is that you have a sibling rivalry.’ We did. He was like a brother, and I loved him that way.”

Ebert also said “How meaningless was the hate, how deep was the love.”

And that’ll have to be good enough for me.

©2023 Chicago Tribune. Visit at chicagotribune.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

There’s a lot of quiet — in an empty living room save for one woman, at Graceland, in other spaces, a few seconds of solitude representing minutes and hours and years — in the new film “Priscilla,” from writer-director Sofia Coppola.

The movie couldn’t tell its truth without it. We’re witnessing a version of Priscilla Presley’s singularly strange and wondrous life in the eye of the hurricane known as Elvis Presley. Last year’s Baz Luhrmann “Elvis” biopic had little interest in the eye; the movie was all hurricane and fancy packaging. “Priscilla” opens a different and, I think, far more intriguing package.

Coppola has made a generation’s worth of features by now, since “The Virgin Suicides” in 1999. This is her eighth, not counting her staging of an Italian opera production of Verdi’s “La Traviata.” “Priscilla” is one of her best, as well as her latest, most carefully considered evocation of celebrity, intimacy and the tantalizing, precarious intersection of the two.

It begins with a close-up of orange-red toenails on pale, rose-colored shag carpet. It is 1959. Priscilla Ann Beaulieu, played with remarkable ease from ages 14 to 27 by Cailee Spaeny, adapts as well as she can as a vaguely disoriented fish out of water. A military brat accustomed to relocations, Priscilla finds herself in West Germany, where her mother and U.S. Air Force stepfather have moved.

The biggest star in the universe is stationed there, too. Through an intermediary at the local malt shop, Priscilla receives an invite to a little party at GI Elvis Presley’s place. Frankie Avalon’s yearning “Venus” sets the mood for their first meeting, negotiated, torturously, with her parents’ wary approval. At the nighttime party — lent all the right, shadowy promise of something forbidden by cinematographer Philippe Le Sourd — Priscilla’s scoped by the eagle eyes of women and men closer to Elvis’s age than to the ninth-grader in their midst.

Elvis, Priscilla has been told in advance, likes to meet folks from back home. It takes one kiss from this unique combination of superstar confidence/bashful mama’s boy for Priscilla’s head to swim with the incredibility of it all. (This was a highly strategic courtship; she didn’t become Priscilla Presley until she turned 18.) “Priscilla,” the movie, exists in a state of hushed wonderment, magical one minute, bittersweet the next.

Soon enough, this star-kissed teenager’s life is the stuff of ever more amazing waking dreams. First, with Elvis away in Hollywood making movies and whoopee with Nancy Sinatra or Ann-Margret or players to be named later, in tell-alls, Priscilla becomes an unmarried but spoken-for princess at Graceland, Elvis’s Tennessee palace. The pills, which Elvis gets her on early and often, turn Elvis into an experiment in chemical imbalance. Everywhere he goes, a Greek chorus of musicians and yes-men goes, too.

Coppola, who has known more first- and second-hand celebrity than the average contemporary filmmaker, seems especially well-attuned to Priscilla’s experiences, and to slowly (sometimes suddenly) dawning realizations of what her life has become. Now and then “Priscilla” settles for standard-issue biopic shorthand, as when Elvis shuts down his woman’s desire to work with: “It’s either me or career, baby.” But in this context, without the usual emphasis or underlining, the line feels honest, and authentic, even in the midst of the dream of desire, love and eventual departure we’re watching.

The ending’s a little less than it should be, I suppose, and Coppola has never made movies (“Lost in Translation” being a possible exception) that follow prescribed, crowd-pleasing narrative paths. You won’t find anything about Colonel Tom Parker here, or much glitz beyond a few really tasty transitional montages, blending archival footage of Las Vegas, for example, with some classically inclined shots of the roulette wheel spinning and Priscilla and Elvis, looking like down-home royalty.

What you get with Coppola’s perspective, and Priscilla Presley’s, is a small, sure film about the largest of royal showbiz lives led in the brightest, harshest of spotlights, or in the unsettling quiet of a room, where someone has just left it with a little less oxygen. Thanks to “Priscilla,” we know a little more about how Priscilla Presley found herself there in the first place — and, with an incisive kind of restraint, what it may have looked, felt and hurt like.

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‘PRISCILLA’

3.5 stars (out of 4)

MPA rating: R (for drug use and some language)

Running time: 1:53

How to watch: In theaters Friday

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©2023 Chicago Tribune. Visit chicagotribune.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

“Five Nights at Freddy’s” isn’t half as scary as one or two of the parent-vs.-parent brawls I witnessed a few years ago at Chuck E. Cheese’s, but that’s another story, too intense for any storytelling medium.

Let’s talk about this story. Video game creator Scott Cawthon’s Chuck E.-inspired 2014 phenomenon takes place in a decrepit Freddy Fazbear’s Pizzajoint, with the requisite ball pit, wonky electrical wiring and smell of death, with a whiff of sheet cake. Its threatening animatronic creatures — a bear, a bunny, a one-pawed fox, a face-eating robo-bird — run the place at night, and are inhabited by the disintegrating bodies and tortured souls of children who … well, spoiler there, a little late on the warning, sorry, moving on.

In the game, you take the role of night security guard Mike. You monitor the barely functional surveillance cameras and, once the robot killers come for you, you try to stay alive. There’s a labyrinth of backstory, dripped out in dribs and drabs, but Cawthon’s simple setup begot many sequels and a welter of spinoffs and subreddits and fan theories. Now it’s a movie.

And? It’s an odd one, indecisive about its tone and intentions. Full-on R-rated sadism? Half the gaming world is already mad about the movie not going in that direction. Instead, the filmmakers and screenwriters chose to squeak by with a PG-13, leaning away from five nights of steadily mounting carnage and body parts and toward a thick layer of earnest new material devoted to Mike’s horrific childhood depicted in frequent flashbacks and nightmares. These take him back, like a dream-state detective, to the Nebraska campground where Mike’s brother was abducted, never to be found.

Mike’s current life feels much the same as his dream state: stuck, bereft and looking for answers. He’s doing all he can to retain custody of his younger sister. And here we run into what the film industry has referred to for more than a century as “story problems.”

Cawthon and fellow screenwriters Seth Cuddeback and Emma Tammi (who also directed) take an earnest interest in developing the central brother-sister relationship. It works, sometimes. As Mike, Josh Hutcherson (”The Hunger Games”) draws you into a character’s sullen state of mind, persuasively, by doing very little. But there’s a ton of complication and clutter in “Five Nights at Freddy’s.”

The adaptation veers from scenes of Mike’s dream state, to the hapless crew of young thugs employed by Mike’s evil aunt (Mary Stuart Masterson, who deserves better) to discredit Mike, so she can gain custody of her niece (Piper Rubio). A kindly police officer (Elizabeth Lail) knows more about the Fazbear emporium of pain than she’s telling. And there’s the unsettling job counselor (Matthew Lillard) who sets up Mike as Fazbear’s newest night watchman.

I don’t care much about neatness with most genre exercises, but this one’s pretty sludgy. I do care about, and resist, the film’s attempt to be a cuddly version of “Saw,” with faces getting sliced open by a robo-critter’s whirring saw blades. To keep the PG-13 rating intact, the camera and editor cut away just before the splurch, nearly every time. This means millions of 8-year-olds will likely be at the multiplexes this weekend, in a funk, alongside older kids and young adults steeped in nostalgia for the hours they spent at home being Mike. Current box office estimates suggest “Five Nights at Freddy’s” should make nearly double its $25 million production budget by Monday.

Cawthon has known great love and great hate online. Two years ago his political views and donations (he’s a Trump fan, in addition to being an anti-abortion Christian Republican) provoked some controversy and online blowback from former fans. In the movie, there’s a scene where Mike longs for the traditional God-fearing family taken away from him so cruelly. Hutcherson knows exactly how hard to stress this bit: just enough for it to register. The premise, meantime, of “Five Nights at Freddy’s” is entirely about the cruelty, and very likely would’ve made more sense as a straight-up R-rated splatterfest.

Then again, would I have liked a more gratuitous take on the same material? Reader, I cannot say. This one’s shorter than the “It” movies, at least. Once a child-abduction horror premise exceeds the 2-hour mark, the EXIT sign to the left of the screen starts looking better than the screen itself.

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‘FIVE NIGHTS AT FREDDY’S’

2 stars (out of 4)

MPA rating: PG-13 (for strong violent content, bloody images, and language)

Running time: 1:50

How to watch: In theaters and streaming on Peacock Thursday

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©2023 Chicago Tribune. Visit chicagotribune.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

“You have a beautiful family, a beautiful life,” says one old friend to another. “I hope it was worth it.”

In “Fellow Travelers,” the Showtime limited series adapted from the 2007 novel of the same name, “it” means living in the closet, which has been professionally beneficial for the sleekly handsome Hawkins Fuller (Matt Bomer) — it’s the 1980s and he’s about to take a diplomatic posting in Milan — but devastating on his soul.

We flash back 30 years to the ‘50s, when he meets and seduces the very earnest and very Catholic Tim Laughlin (Jonathan Bailey) at a Washington, D.C., party. They fall in lust and then in love, all in secret, during Sen. Joseph McCarthy’s Red Scare hunt for communists, which extends out to include gay people as well: The Lavender Scare. Any opportunity to remind audiences of the cruel depravity and hypocrisy of McCarthy and right-hand man Roy Cohn is aces in my book.

This matters because the two men in our central couple have government jobs on the line — Hawk works at the State Department, Tim is literally in the belly of the beast as a staffer in McCarthy’s Senate office. Their relationship is complicated (maybe even fueled) by the threat of exposure, but also because Tim wears his heart on his sleeve, whereas Hawk resists deep emotional connections. Maybe these differences would have doomed their romance regardless of the era.

Creator Ron Nyswaner (whose credits include “Philadelphia” as well as the Showtime series “Ray Donovan” and “Homeland”) has added in a new storyline, about a Black political reporter played by Jelani Alladin, who forms a long-term partnership with a drag performer he meets at a swanky underground gay club he and Hawk frequent. “Fellow Travelers” takes a similar approach to these portions as Amazon’s remake of “A League of Their Own,” creating a parallel narrative that gives the show’s Black characters their own lives and interests. Their stories may occasionally intersect with the show’s white characters, but their existence on-screen isn’t dependent on furthering those storylines.

Steamy, sad and stylish all at once, “Fellow Travelers” toggles back and forth in time. One episode is set in the ‘60s, when Tim is a war protester on the lam and Hawk is struggling to maintain his facade of domestic bliss (Allison Williams plays his wife, a role that’s similar to what Anne Hathaway was saddled with in “Brokeback Mountain”). Another episode takes place in the ‘70s, when Tim visits a drug-addled Hawk on Fire Island and rescues him from a midlife crisis.

But the show is strongest (and gives over most of its running time) to the portions set in the ‘50s, when Hawk’s Don Draper swagger and Tim’s boyish infatuation first collide.

Their relationship is defined by this uneven power dynamic. Earnest and wide-eyed, it takes Tim a surprisingly long time to become disgusted enough by McCarthy to quit his job. Hawk is older and he’s an operator. He christens his lover with the diminutive nickname “Skippy” and I cringed every time.

Their clandestine affair plays on this imbalance. “Who do you belong to?” Hawk implores mid-coitus and you can interpret that as kink, or maybe a deeper reflection of his obsessive need to be in control at all times.

The sex, on the scale of TV explicitness, is akin to what “Queer as Folk” was doing two decades ago, with a variety of positions and orgasms to be had. Some of it furtive and in public restrooms. Some of it in the relaxed setting of a private home. The washboard abs strike me as anachronistic — even Rock Hudson at his peak didn’t have the gym-enhanced physique of these fictional desk jockeys — but I doubt anyone is complaining. The show’s wigs are another matter.

The series is occasionally too mannered and presentational for its own good, but there’s real heat and chemistry between Bomer (“White Collar”) and Bailey (“Bridgerton”), who play around with this push-pull dynamic in interesting ways. Both Hawk and Tim are driven by restless desires. For carnal pleasures, but also proximity to power and influence. To make a difference. To find meaning.

It’s a story both intimate and not, and that largely comes down to the limitations embodied by a character like Hawk, who keeps everyone at arm’s length, lest he be found out. His most emotionally honest moment comes when he tells off his Waspy father on the guy’s deathbed. The elder Fuller has held a grudge ever since walking in on one of his son’s entanglements. You shoulda knocked, Hawk shrugs before turning heel, unmoved by the old man’s indignant demand for an apology.

Is television the ideal medium for novels? You’d think so, with episodes functioning like chapters of a book. There have been a raft of adaptations in recent weeks, from “Lessons in Chemistry” to “The Other Black Girl” to the forthcoming “Black Cake,” but I’m not convinced this is always the best format. Sometimes the extra running time just means more scenes. You don’t learn or feel more about the characters, or the world they inhabit.

That’s true of “Fellow Travelers.”

It’s mostly worth the journey anyway.

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‘FELLOW TRAVELERS’

2.5 stars (out of 4)

Rating: TV-MA

How to watch: 9 p.m. ET Sundays on Showtime (and streaming on Paramount+)

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©2023 Chicago Tribune. Visit chicagotribune.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.