What would Grey’s Anatomy be like if, instead of focusing on hospital surgery residents competing to enter the operating room, it focused on political journalists during a presidential campaign trying to find the scoop? Maybe no one ever asked this question, but someone did conceive the answer: The Girls on the Bus, released by HBO Max, is crystal clear in its intentions, references, and ambition.
Sadie McCarthy (Melissa Benoist) is grounded at work. In the last presidential elections, after media coverage of a candidate with emotional involvement, she cried in public over the candidate’s defeat in the elections. She became the laughingstock of the profession and her bosses forced her to write reports, for example, on the ducks in Central Park for three years.
Now you have the opportunity to return to the arena of political journalism. He wants to follow Joanna Gleason (Caroline Bennett) through the Democratic primary, the candidate who inspires him the most, and promises to leave aside her preferences in articles. An obstacle to achieving his goal, for the record, is the new political press secretary: it’s Malcolm (Brandon Scott), the guy he didn’t treat too well the last time they met on the road following the candidates.
This, for the record, is not the main plot but the friendship that he promises to establish with three other colleagues: Grace (Carla Gugino), a veteran who knows all the tricks of the trade, Kimberlyn (Christina Elmore), a journalist black woman who tries to assert herself in an ultra-conservative environment, and Lola (Natasha Behnam), who is an influencer who translates politics into the language of TikTok, Instagram and Twitter, without being committed to any media outlet but to her sponsors.
Behind the project is a prolific screenwriter like Julie Plec, known above all for her work as showrunner on The vampire diaries or The originals, and Amy Chozick, a political journalist who published a book about her experiences following Hillary Clinton, in which The Girls on the Bus is freely inspired. The series, however, might not have any link to a published work or real story because its reference, as we said, is in Grey’s Anatomy.
It feeds on the duality of personal relationships between ambitious professional colleagues: that need to have allies to combat loneliness and be able to help each other but who, at the same time, can become rivals after five minutes when competing for the same exclusive.
In the pilot episode, two elements of romantic potential are also introduced and are in the foreground: the ex, converted into press secretary, and Scott Foley as an a priori Democratic candidate with no options but who has Sadie on his radar. That one conversation takes place at the doors of an elevator and another is caused by accidentally colliding in a hotel is a declaration of intent: this is not Aaron Sorkin but a version with a little more sauce.
The script is idealistic in an explicit way: the political positions of the four protagonists are exposed without hesitation, openly exposing what each of them is like. It also revels both conceptually and aesthetically in a femininity that is as self-conscious as it is canonical.
With Melissa Benoist as narrator (and producer behind the cameras), the parallels with Grey’s Anatomy are inevitable in the presentation although supposedly temporary: the series also introduces a thriller plot that must end with the protagonist detained by the FBI. Will she have a few drops of Scandal?
