Is 'The Girls on the Bus' Based on a True Story?
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The new series The Girls on the Bus, streaming now on Max, takes places in a fictional world. The four reporters it depicts—and the presidential candidates they’re following around the country—aren’t real people working for real news outlets. But audiences could be forgiven for feeling like the drama that unfolds on the 10-part series feels recognizable; it’s based on the book Chasing Hillary by journalist Amy Chozik, who chronicled Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign and also served as the Bus showrunner.
“I wrote a book about my experiences covering both of Hillary's campaigns and I decided early on I really wanted it to be part memoir—I thought of it like Julie and Julia, but with politics instead of cooking,” Chozik says. “I was in the process of writing the book when I had breakfast with two Warner Brothers executives, and I was telling them about the idea, they were like, ‘there's a show in there, stay in touch.’”
The series follows reporter Sadie McCarthy (Melissa Benoist), an eager reporter looking to make her name—and bounce back from an embarrassing viral moment—as she travels the country tracking a frontrunner. Fate and the campaign press gods have conspired to put her cheek by jowl with glamorous, flinty news veteran Grace Gordon Greene (Carla Gugino), conflicted conservative broadcast personality Kimberlyn Kendrick (Christina Elmore), and Lola Rahaii (Natasha Benham), an activist influencer who’s covering the race mostly from her iPhone. The characters and their situations are all fictional, but as Chozik and Elmore explain, not without real-life inspiration.
What Is the Truth, Really?
“What was really important to me was that this world feels real,” Chozik says to T&C. “There are lots of Easter eggs of reality in there: the girls are always looking for a power outlet or sitting on the floor to charge a laptop, and the configuration of the bus was very important. It’s really difficult to shoot in a bus, and there were all sorts of creative production ideas about how to make is easier, but I was adamant that the bus look like it would in reality. During production, there were a lot of things I was stuck on making feel real."
That ranged from the bus itself to the less-than-five-star hotels where the reporters and their subjects often stayed. In fact, some of the moments that feel like they were created just for television are the ones the show made sure to get right—proving both that fact can be stranger than fiction, and that, as Chozik says, jobs like these are often more prestigious than glamorous. “You run into your presidential candidate at the breakfast bar of a Hilton Garden Inn,” she says. “You really do see people out of context.”
Finding out what felt right cut both ways. Elmore explains that why she’s always been more of a newspaper reader than TV news fanatic, working on the series did inspire her to turn on CNN a bit more often. “More recently I’ve been watching news and being like, ‘Oh, I know where they are. I know what they're doing,’” she says. “It feels similar to being an actor watching television, how you’re always critiquing the acting, the writing, the directing, or the lighting. Now I'm asking, ‘Is she doing her anchor voice,’ or noticing when someone’s wearing a coat because they’re filing a story from outside. It’s sort of inside baseball, but they’re things I’d never really thought about before."
A Bit of TV Magic
Is everything on the series real? Decidedly not. But even the things that are fictional are rooted in reality—and some of them were very familiar to the actors on the series. “We were making this show in all these cramped places on a soundstage,” Elmore says, “and I realized how similar it was to these journalists on the road. I also didn't know the mechanics of how covering a campaign works; it’s a very difficult job to get breaking news to people every day.”
Chozik also says the series gave her the opportunity to create moments she wishes had happened in her own experience. “One of the beautiful things about collaborating with [writer and showrunner] Rina Mimoun was that every day in the writer's room, she would say, ‘Amy, what's a conversation you wish she had had or a scene that you wish would've happened that didn't?’ Because we could write that! There’s a scene later in the season between a female presidential candidate and Sadie that is something I’d have loved to happen to me. So, things are drawn from real life but they’re also drawn from fantasy. This is TV, so I had a lot of fun envisioning what could have been.”
Any Resemblance…
The Girls on the Bus characters aren’t real people, but they’re recognizable—and that’s no accident. “When I first got the role, I thought, I need to go and watch all of these conservative journalists and figure out what their messaging is,” Elmore says. “But I realized that what I love about the world we're playing in is that it's not America today, and it's not this election. It's a fictionalized version where everyone, including the nominees and all the journalists, are sort of amalgams of people we think we might know.”
Chozik adds, “As my journalistic hero, Nora Ephron, said, ‘Everything is copy.’ So, certainly there are amalgams of real people and things I’ve experienced, but I wouldn’t say any of the characters is specifically one person. Grace is inspired by the generation of women who have mentored me, from Maureen Dowd to Andrea Mitchell.”
Stream The Girls on the Bus Now
There Could Be More To Come
Just like how real-life reporters follow the early contenders and then move on to the nominated candidates during each election cycle, The Girls on the Bus is poised to take its characters to the next level in subsequent seasons. “There are definitely stories we want to tell,” Chozik says. “Without giving away any spoilers, but if we get another season, it would the general election, and with that comes a whole new world. They would be on the bus anymore, they'd be on a plane and they'd be flying around to spending more time in swing states. The primaries are this frantic, city-to-city thing, and one of the things about covering the general election is spending so much time in Ohio or Michigan to get to know those places better. We've got lots of other things we want to want to explore with the ladies.”
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