Max Misfire ‘The Girls on the Bus’ Tries and Fails to Make Politics Fun Again: TV Review
14.03.2024 - 14:07
/ variety.com
Alison Herman TV Critic The Max series “The Girls on the Bus” wants to be a frothy workplace comedy about female empowerment. Such proudly escapist fluff has a valued place on TV; “The Bold Type” got five seasons out of its more optimistic spin on “The Devil Wears Prada,” and while “Glamorous” was quickly canceled by Netflix, it had the right idea in casting Kim Cattrall as an exacting makeup mogul.
There’s no reason “The Girls on the Bus” couldn’t slot into this tradition of slickly produced, deceptively mindless entertainment, apart from one small detail: it’s set in the world of high-stakes presidential campaigns, possibly the least escapist environment possible in 2024. Co-created by veteran showrunner Julie Plec (“The Vampire Diaries”) and journalist Amy Chozick, “The Girls on the Bus” is a loose riff on “Chasing Hillary,” Chozick’s 2018 memoir about covering the Clinton campaign for the New York Times.
A factual adaptation of the book, including said campaign’s conclusion, would likely have to be a horror movie. So Plec and Chozick instead create an alternate universe that’s stranded between pure fabulism and its obvious inspiration.
“The Girls in the Bus” has nothing to say about the real world, abdicating any attempt at actual insight into politics or media. But it’s unable to build a new reality that’s different enough from our own to offer an outlet to those in need of distraction.
The show is stuck with the worst of both worlds: its frequent silliness feels inappropriate, while its occasional grandstanding comes off as entirely out of its depth. Protagonist Sadie McCarthy (a conspicuously brunette Melissa Benoist) is a correspondent for the New York Sentinel, a thinly veiled version of Chozick’s former
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