The Girls on the Bus Cancelled at Max — Get Scoop on What Would Have Happened in Season 2
The Girls on the Bus’ journey has come to the end of the road: Max has cancelled the Melissa Benoist-fronted comedic drama after just one season, TVLine has learned.
“While Max will not be moving forward with a second season of The Girls on the Bus, we are grateful to have partnered with immensely talented Amy Chozick, Julie Plec, Rina Mimoun, as well as the teams at Berlanti Productions and Warner Bros. Television,” the streamer said in a statement. “We are so proud of this powerful story of found family and the celebration of journalism, in all its forms. We thank them and our unrivaled cast for all their incredible work and collaboration.”
The series was inspired by a chapter in Amy Chozick’s 2018 novel Chasing Hillary, which was based on the author’s time covering Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign as a political reporter. Chozick and Julie Plec served as executive producers alongside showrunner Rina Mimoun, and Greg Berlanti and Sarah Schechter (for Berlanti Productions).
Supergirl vet Benoist played Sadie McCarthy, “a journalist who romanticizes the original ‘Boys on the Bus’ and who scrapped her whole life for her own shot at covering a presidential campaign for the paper of record. Sadie hits the trail and eventually bonds with three female competitors,” per the official logline. “Despite their differences, these women become a found family with a front-row seat to the greatest soap opera in town: the battle for the White House.”
Joining Benoist on the campaign trail were Carla Gugino (The Fall of the House of Usher) as veteran journalist Grace; Natasha Behnam (Mayans M.C.) as social media influencer/activist Lola; and Christina Elmore (Insecure) as conservative network reporter Kimberlyn. The series-regular cast also included Brandon Scott (13 Reasons Why, Dead to Me) as Sadie’s love interest/political staffer Malcolm.
In the season finale, which dropped on May 9, Sadie and her reporter pals discovered damning information about presidential hopeful Hayden Wells Garrett, aka Hot White Guy (played by Scott Foley), but that didn’t stop him from officially being named the Democratic candidate.
Elsewhere in the episode, Malcolm made a big, romantic speech to Sadie; Lola was offered a job at the Wall Street Journal after breaking a major donor scandal; Grace realized her daughter had a knack for investigative reporting; and Kimmy got fired from Liberty News Direct after she called out her employer on air, leading her to start her own media company.
In a post mortem Q&A, Mimoun revealed that Season 2 would have followed the general election, during which the girls get off the bus and onto a plane.
“We finally meet the incumbent Republican, so that would be a piece of the story,” Mimoun shared. “The girls are, essentially, trying to dig up the dirt on Hot White Guy and find out all of his deep, dark secrets.”
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“One of the things that I was very excited about was we would be adding Grace’s daughter to the bus,” Mimoun continued. “We’d finally have [Malcolm] and Sadie trying to maintain some sort of a relationship now that he’s out of the business and it’s no longer a conflict of interest.”
Plus, Season 2 would have found Kimberlyn potentially starting a family while also trying to launch her own company. As for Lola, she would be “not hating every part of this corporate world that she has been attacking in Season 1 and trying to wrestle with that in her own way,” Mimoun said. (Get even more Season 2 scoop.)
The Girls on the Bus fans, hit the comments with your reactions!
