'The Girls on the Bus' Is 'The West Wing' Crossed with a Live, Laugh, Love Poster

By Dustin Rowles | TV | March 19, 2024 |

By Dustin Rowles | TV | March 19, 2024 |

Back in my youthful, idealistic college days, where I was a journalism and political science student, two of my favorite books were Hunter S. Thompson’s Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail ‘72 and Timothy Crouse’s The Boys on the Bus, a non-fiction book about the journalists covering the ‘72 campaign, including Thompson. I ultimately wrote my honors thesis on Hunter, specifically how he extracted more truth from his surreal fiction than from the reality of the campaign trail.

The irony is that Max’s The Girls on the Bus — a riff on Crouse’s book — is a heavily fictionalized adaptation of journalist Amy Chozick’s Chasing Hillary, a memoir about the 2016 election. Yet, there is not an ounce of truth to be found in either the fiction of the TV show or the reality upon which it is based. I had hoped for something approximating the neoliberal fantasies of The West Wing, or at least something smart, fun, and vaguely based in reality like Netflix’s Keri Russell series, The Diplomat.

Alas, The Girls on the Bus, which was originally developed for Netflix and then for The CW before landing on Max, is more akin to Sex and the City on the Campaign Trail, an escapist fantasy that exists in a world before Donald Trump, despite being based on the 2016 campaign. Apparently, Max believes that in an election year, viewers do not want to see our political universe reflected in a television show about a Presidential campaign. Girls on the Bus uses the structure of Chozick’s memoir but divorces itself from the reality of that campaign. It comes from showrunner Julie Plec of The Vampire Diaries, and it feels like a CW series crossed with a Netflix one, woefully out of touch with the branding of HBO or even what was once HBO Max.

I’ll grant that the cast is decent, beginning with a brunette Melissa Benoist, who plays the lead, Sadie McCarthy, a journalist working for an NYTimes stand-in who has a messy personal life and a reputation for being unable to report on her subjects objectively. Her inability to distance herself from a candidate who was a shoo-in to become the first female President cost that candidate the previous election (OK, well, there is the occasional nod to the reality of the Clinton campaign). Now Sadie is following Caroline Bennet (Joanna Gleason), whose campaign is derailed by a sex scandal that involves orgies and fruit being eaten out of asses. I am not kidding.

Also on the bus: Carla Gugino as Grace Gordon Greene, a serious veteran journalist working for a newspaper modeled after The Washington Post who has to contend with the evolving ways that campaigns are covered, which brings us to Lola Rahaii (Natasha Behnam), from whom Grace seeks advice. Lola proudly flaunts the rules of journalism (in part because she doesn’t know them), but her massive social media following gives her an outsized influence (with a demographic that probably does not vote). Finally, there’s Kimberlyn Kendrick (Christina Elmore), a wealthy, Black Republican journalist being tokenized by a Fox News-like network.

The bones of a decent show are here, but Girls on the Bus is not really interested in ethical quandaries in journalism or politics in the post-Trump era. It’s only interested in being entertaining, and in doing so, it exists in a universe that feels more like the world we see in films like Dave, Bulworth, or The Distinguished Gentleman: fangless ’90s era comedies with almost no cultural value. And maybe that’s OK. Maybe the powers-that-be at Max are right, and viewers do not want politics in their show about politics. Maybe they are more interested in watching these women bossgirl a Presidential campaign.

To each their own, but Girls on the Bus compounds its issues by actually including Hunter S. Thompson (P.J. Sosko) in the series as a ghostly apparition that offers Sadie advice. Thompson would be rolling over in the cannon his ashes were blasted out of if he could see what they have reduced him to: A television contrivance whose quotes have been turned into live-laugh-love-like inspirational slogans. The only Thompson quote appropriate for The Girls on the Bus, however, is this one: “In a world of thieves, the only final sin is stupidity.”