Here’s Why The Girls on the Bus Is a Trump-Free Space
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The post Here’s Why The Girls on the Bus Is a Trump-Free Space appeared first on Consequence.
Here’s the detail about The Girls on the Bus that makes the show’s priorities clear: Many projects, during the audition phase, will do “chemistry reads,” meant to test out potential romantic pairings. However, the creators of the Max political dramedy also had chemistry reads to see how some of the titular “Girls” would work together on screen — as rivals as well as friends.
“I think that’s such an important part of our show,” says Christina Elmore, who plays conservative on-camera journalist Kimberlyn. “The main thing is the relationships between the characters and the family they found. So yeah, I didn’t do any sort of romantic relationship chemistry test. It was all with the ladies and it really helped.”
The Girls on the Bus is set during a presidential campaign being covered by a group of female reporters who find themselves bonding despite their personal and political differences. While directly inspired by a chapter from show co-creator Amy Chozick’s memoir Chasing Hillary, it’s also very much set in an alternate universe far away from our own, which executive producer Julie Plec says felt essential.
The reason for this, Plec tells Consequence, is that “in the world we were living in, the truth was way stranger than anything fiction could have brought us. The truth felt like we had already jumped the shark. And it’s just so divisive. You’re trying to tell a story about four women with different points of view and different sides of the aisle coming together and finding friendship. And none of us could believe that that was true in the world that we operate in. It just seemed like an unachievable dynamic and an unachievable chemistry.”
Thus, in this fictional world, Plec says that the current President of the United States is “some nice, very Christian, Mike Pence kind of man.” However, as Chozick notes, real political references are scattered throughout the series: “Like Kimberlyn loves Ronald Reagan, and there is a Carlos Danger/Anthony Weiner joke and a John Edwards joke. It felt safe enough to joke about those two.”
To draw the line between our reality and the show, the writers officially made Barack Obama’s presidency the cut-off point — anything prior to him being elected in 2008 was fair game. Talking about Obama, showrunner Rina Mimoun says, “all of a sudden became too fresh. Too real, too.”
Notes Plec, “I do feel like in our world, perhaps there was a Black president.”
There was no Donald Trump in this reality, however — a choice made for many reasons, according to Chozick. For example, the character of Kimberlyn (both Black and conservative) “was hard to imagine in a Trump world.”
The decision made sense to Carla Gugino, playing one of the more seasoned reporters on the campaign trail. “I do think it’s really a great idea, that they decided to have all fictitious candidates and to have a certain heightened sense of reality about it too,” she says. “These candidates are playing on archetypes we’ve seen and certain people we know, but they take off from there, and I think that that allowed us to tell the truth about whatever time and politics we are in a little bit more.”
Plus, says Elmore, “We don’t have any sort of big character suffocating the room, which I think is so, so nice.”
Chozick knows how a Trump-like figure can affect a campaign from experience, thanks to her on-the-ground coverage of the 2016 election. “He consumed everything. Everything became centered around him. And that was not what we wanted [for the show]. We wanted to center it around friendship and our female journalists and the girls and the debates they have about their personal lives and about journalism.”
“I was always excited about that aspect of the show,” notes series star Melissa Benoist, “to be a part of something that I think hopefully people will be moved by, and to see different perspectives and to remember that listening to each other is so important.”
That said, Chozick says “I think we touch on some of the things that gave rise to Trump, in terms of the melding of reality television and our politics and celebrity, and also the scrutiny on female candidates and kind of ignoring other candidates because you don’t think they have a chance. To have that giant personality, it felt like a different show.”
“I think it would’ve been depressing,” Mimoun agrees. “And the show is really fun.”
That was the experience many members of the cast say they had, shooting the 10-episode season in the comparatively calmer days of 2022. (Griffin Dunne, who plays a tough but fair mentor to Melissa Benoist’s Sadie, says 2022 “seems so long ago, I can’t even remember whatever the events were that had my heart in the middle of my throat. 2022 just seems quaint and playful. I feel nostalgic about two years ago.”)
At the time they were shooting, cast member Brandon Scott says, “it was around the midterms, maybe, and I was listening to a lot of Pod Save America and they were already talking about how this red wave was going to happen… I actually think being a part of this show helped with some of my anxiety around then.”
The Girls on the Bus (Max)
Natasha Behnam, an Iranian actor who plays a social media influencer covering the campaign, adds that at the time Girls on the Bus was shooting, “there was a sort of mini-revolution happening in Iran, with women in Iran fighting for their rights. And I remember feeling like there was so much pain, and I was also so proud of the women that were really fighting for their rights, and I was being very vocal on social media, while also starting the show that was all about politics and a young woman who’s trying to use her platform for good. So yeah, it was a weird parallel, but I felt like the show was doing a really good job of telling real-life stories — it’s a mess in real life and it’s a mess on the show, and we’re all just trying our best to reflect back some goodness.”
For Scott Foley, as one of the candidates vying for the highest office in the land, “I was so grateful that, even though it’s a political show, politics were not personal, politics were not a part of the conversation. You know, it dominates our lives to a point where I know it’s important, but it should not, to that degree — the divisiveness and everything surrounding the latest political whatever the hell is happening. I was happy to not have to think about it while I was on set. The fake politics were enough, I think, for everybody to deal with that the real stuff did not trickle in.”
Says Benoist, “It feels a bit like an escape, in that it is about compassion and found family. Yes, we are in the political arena, but I would argue sometimes real politics is even crazier than what we have in our show. So we are, in a sense, an escape in that way while still touting some really important topics and values, of how we relate to each other and connect as human beings.”
Despite the elements of the show that lead it to feeling escapist, Mimoun says that what drew her to the material was how “honest and raw” Chozick’s initial writing about the 2016 election had been. “I was like, this is why I want to do something like this. Because this is real. This is rooted in an emotion that we as women are feeling. We as women are feeling not seen. And we’re getting angry about it. I felt like tapping into the anger was a really exciting jumping-off point, because it was something I don’t feel like we see enough of on TV, personally.”
As for the big idea presented by the series, that reaching across even the bus aisle is possible, that we are still capable of listening to people with different outlooks — Plec says she struggled with it during the making of the show, but came to the other side after watching the completed episodes. “It is warm and inviting, this world that they’ve created, where you can have those conversations and they can be productive and friendly and meaningful,” Plec says. “And I want to be in that world and I’m going to hope that we find that world. I think that’s what TV does at its best, is it paints the picture of the world you wish you had.”
New episodes of The Girls on the Bus debut Thursdays on Max. The season premiere is now streaming.
Here’s Why The Girls on the Bus Is a Trump-Free Space
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