THE DEALS ON THE BUS GO 'ROUND AND 'ROUND
New series solves problem of making a show about Hillary Clinton's candidacy
Not everyone wants to relive the 2016 presidential election.
That was always the challenge facing The Girls on the Bus, Max's watchable and startlingly apolitical dramedy about the agony of political reporting. Inspired by former New York Times reporter Amy Chozick's memoir Chasing Hillary, which chronicles her years following Clinton on the campaign trail, the series explores the beat's grubby compromises, temptations and rewards by fictionalizing almost every aspect of the source material.
In so doing, it turns a memoir about a globally significant event — and missteps that contributed to the outcome — into an ensemble show that locates its narrative stakes in epiphanies about writing and friendship. Also female solidarity, political differences be damned.
The series pinballed from Netflix to The CW before finally landing at the streamer Max, which might account for some of its oddities, as well as its pleasures. (In Canada, it streams on Crave.)
Co-created by Chozick and Julie Plec (The Vampire Diaries), the 10-episode season imports the structure but strips out the specific content of Chozick's real observations and highly consequential dilemmas (over how to cover Clinton, among other things — and whether she and other journalists became Vladimir Putin's “puppets” in the course of chasing the Podesta-leaks story). The result is a frequently funny drama following fictional reporters as they cover a flawed female candidate in the lead-up to a fictional Democratic National Convention.
They have different philosophies, backgrounds, temperaments and politics. The protagonist, Sadie Mccarthy (Melissa Benoist) is a sympathetic mess struggling to reconcile orders to remain objective with her attachment to a candidate. After a career setback (she became a meme when her candidate lost), she has a second chance to resume her political beat at the Sentinel, a thinly veiled version of the New York Times.
Travelling with Sadie and competing with her for scoops is Grace (Carla Gugino), an older, icily effective “scoop machine” and near-celebrity herself who works for the Washington Union (a thinly veiled version of The Post). She puts career before family with no apologies, much to her floundering college-aged daughter's (Rose Jackson Smith) distress. She's also competing with family; her estranged father, also a famous journalist, undermines her whenever he can.
Rounding out the quartet are Lola (Natasha Behnam), a 20-something socialist Tiktok influencer who funds her journalism by hawking sponsored products to her massive following, and Kimberlyn (Christina Elmore), a Black conservative from a wealthy family working for a Fox News stand-in where she's regularly tokenized.
Fictionalizing the world of Chasing Hillary turned out to be solution to the problem of adapting it. The closest analogue is Apple TV+'S The Morning Show, which also built a parallel media universe to explore the fallout of a real-world event (in that case, the #Metoo exposure of Today's Matt Lauer). Like that show, The Girls on the Bus is a fake-out. Purporting to take on a historical moment, it actually prioritizes personal quests — and interpersonal connections — over institutional and political crises.
The result is gripping stuff if you're interested in writerly struggles. And in thinking through the grimy ethics of what these kinds of journalists sometimes have to do (extract confidences and then betray them, essentially committing private harms for the sake of an abstract public good). The series works best when it gives these characters room to act out as
the passionate weirdos they are. The dialogue crackles when they grapple with what journalism is, whether objectivity is possible and how sources should be cultivated, audiences served, bosses appeased, stories funded or careers built.
That aspect gets blurry as the season proceeds because with the exception of Sadie (who's prone to introspection about the consequences of her coverage), these characters, compelling though they are, can barely be called ciphers for the ideologies they're supposed to represent.
In practice no one, not even the Tiktoker, seems to actually believe what they say they do. A strained but respectable effort to make the women broad-minded enough to bond despite their differences collapses — as the plot brings them together to take a bad man down — into piffle.
While obviously riffing on
The Boys on the Bus, Timothy Crouse's 1973 book about allmale “pack journalism” during the 1972 election, the show sometimes seems to understand itself as making a dull, predictable and thoroughly unpersuasive point about how women, in contrast to their male counterparts, work together instead of competing.
That said, there's a winsome and winky self-awareness to
The Girls on the Bus, and the ways the profession incentivizes self-absorption, that saves it from the dour “ethical conundrums” that perennially plague Reese Witherspoon's character on The Morning Show.
When Sadie gets contacted by an anonymous source, for instance, the show is overt about her hopes that she's going to make her name by working with the next Deep Throat and her growing fear — which proves to be justified — that she's in fact being used by the sorts of ugly forces she'd been idealistically hoping to expose.