Amy Chozick’s interest in political campaigns began in earnest with her memoir Chasing Hillary chronicling her experiences on the 2018 election campaign with a team of journalists. Forward to a few years later, now showrunner Amy Chozick teamed up with Julie Plec (The Vampire Diaries) to tell a similar story about four wildly differing female journalists during a fictitious election campaign trail covering flawed candidates, interviews, and even a scandal.
Amy Chozick’s book Chasing Hillary resonated with Julie Plec and they first met in 2018 to discuss a TV adaptation.
“I have to give Julie all the credit because I had only written a book and a lot of articles. I had not mastered the craft of writing for television. She really taught me the form and how to write to budget. I’m very grateful because she wanted my voice in the show. When we first got into the room and started coming up with these characters, I felt like my soul had come alive.”
Amy Chozick. Photo by Emily Sandifer
“The themes of women and women of power certainly permeate the show,” continues Chozick. Focusing on fictitious candidates allowed her to explore the things she wished would have happened rather than directly translating the things that happened to her on the Hillary campaign trail.
“I could write the conversations I had in my head.” She references the second episode in the series when Felicity Walker (Hetienne Park) confronts Sadie McCarthy (Melissa Benoist) in the elevator. “That’s very much what I imagined Hillary Clinton thought of my coverage.”
Covering Hillary’s Campaign in 2016
“I had been a foreign correspondent in Tokyo when my boss, the Asia Bureau Chief, became Washington Bureau Chief at the Wall Street Journal and asked me, ‘How’d you like to go to Iowa to cover Hillary Clinton?”
Amy confesses that she didn’t fully understand the caucus process at the time. She also learned that polling data doesn’t necessarily reflect what’s happening on the ground. She attended many rallies and paid attention to crowd sizes. “It’s really about this targeting of voters and their data. Maybe crowd size is reflective of enthusiasm.”
Election Day is actually one of the very few days that journalists on the road have some free time until the exit polls
Chozick also wanted to capture a crowded Democratic party primary with different types of candidates vying for your vote. The Girls On The Bus begins in Iowa and ends at the Democratic National Convention.
“What I like about a primary is that you’ve got to give the show a sense of place in each episode whether they’re in South Carolina or Vegas.”
Meet The Journalists
Exploring how journalism has evolved is apparent in The Girls On The Bus, especially now since more women have entered the profession. “When Julie Plec and I sat down to conceive the show, we really wanted four very different types of women, not just different types of journalists.”
“You’ve got Lola Rahaii (Natasha Behnam), the Gen Z influencer and activist, and Carla Gugino’s character, Grace Gordon Greene, the old school print reporter.” Sadie reports for the venerable New York Sentinel and Kimberlyn Kendrick (Christina Elmore) reports for the conservative outlet, Liberty News Direct.
“I think that gave us a great opportunity to get into the debates that they have on the bus, and eventually the tension that results, versus finding their way to becoming friends at the end of the season.”
The Girls On The Bus – Sex In The City meets The West Wing
There is a real tension between journalists who see themselves as part of the legacy media, and in this rising tide of social media, you’ve got a sub stack, an Instagram and TikTok feed, and you’re actually having an influence over the election. Chozick quotes Grace to illustrate her point. “Lola doesn’t have a job. She has a phone.”
Lola Rahaii (Natasha Behnam) & Sadie McCarthy (Melissa Benoist) Photo by Nicole Rivelli/ Max
The practical and ideological differences in covering elections creates fertile soil for journalistic conflict. It also creates a dual track show – one following the campaign and the other following the journalists’ personal lives.
The underlying paradigms of current reporting pit objectivity against authenticity and integrity. “Can you show your bias and still be a good reporter?”
“Some of our references for this world are broadcast news. They take place in a high stakes newsroom, but it’s really about the soap and the characters. We really wanted to portray that their personal lives are complete dumpster fires because they’re giving their lives to the job and to the road.”
Despite characters like Sadie and Grace often intimately discussing their personal lives, they could be best friends, but they’re still essentially competitors. So, there are going to be fights.
“We don’t want it to be too easy for them to become friends, especially when they’re so vastly different.”
The dynamics of four male journalists on the campaign trail were explored in Timothy Crouse’s The Boys On The Bus which covers the 1972 presidential campaign.
“The Boys On The Bus could file once a day and then spend their nights drinking. They’d come home to their wives and be hailed as heroes. You flash forward to when women have the job, they have to file constantly for the web and they’re always on call. As an example, ‘They come home and Grace’s daughter’s gives her a hard time for being away.’”
“It also feels like, by the time women got onto the bus, the journalism industry is struggling in a way that it wasn’t back in the era of the old boys club.” It’s become a 24-hour news cycle and reporting is leaning more into opinions than facts.
A Matter Of Truth
Lola, Sadie, Grace and Kimberlyn spend more time on a bus than they may like, so they may as well find a way to get along. While they may never become inseparable besties after the election, they start seeing themselves as human. They can each learn something from each other. The show arguably coverts aspects about found family.
Kimberlyn Kendrick (Christina Elmore). Photo by Nicole Rivelli/ Max
“I think it’s very easy to dismiss Kimberlyn as the lone conservative on the bus. When Carla and most of the characters declare, ‘We’re not liberal, we’re objective,’ she responds, ‘Keep telling yourself that,’ because I think she had something to teach the women too in terms of their own biases.”
The Girls On The Bus isn’t so much about sisterhood than reimagining how we cover politics. “I think The Boys On The Bus was really a criticism of PAC journalism. I think what we’re doing is similar.”
“Casting aside the notion that we’re all working for our individual outlets, trying to get the story, and trying to beat each other, it’s asking, ‘What’s the best thing for the country?’ Sadie would say it’s the truth. There are characters that tell Sadie the truth doesn’t matter anymore.”
“That’s certainly Sadie’s struggle. That’s the challenge throughout the show of her dreaming her whole life of becoming the reporter for the paper of record and writing the historic front page story. By the time she gets the job, there’s a character, that says, ‘Sadie, grow up. The truth left the building a long time ago.’”
“There’s something beautiful about being a screenwriter. We get to create a world as we wish it was, not as it is. And I think that’s partly some of the wish fulfillment of them coming together.”
Episode Structure
The Girls On The Bus is ostensibly a workplace dramedy balancing their personal with their professional lives. Their relative weighting in each is episode dependent. “In Episode five, Kimberlyn gets married. That’s a very personal episode. The South Carolina primary is very much the backdrop. In Episode seven, it’s very reporter heavy. Grace and Sadie are making a ton of phone calls. They’re hustling. They’re trying to get a big story out,” explains Chozick.
“It’s hard to dramatize reporting like showing a Zoom, somebody making phone calls or digging through documents at their desk. It is not that exciting to look at on the screen. So we had to get creative such as in Episode seven when Grace and Sadie are working in their hotel room. We had to think visually about how can we reflect the reporting, keep the reporting alive, make it feel really vibrant and fun?”
The episodes were broken on index cards. “We had cards for each character, and then we also had a separate category for the conspiracy and the big investigation. We usually start with each character’s arc that episode and then keeping the investigation alive.”
Lola Rahaii (Natasha Behnam) Photo by Nicole Rivelli/ Max
“Sadie gets the burner phone in Episodes two and three. You have to keep advancing that story to lead up to the payoff in the finale. We’d work out the personal story and then we’d see what investigative beats can we leave in.”
“Grace finds Sadie’s hoodie and there’s a phone number on the burner phone. She calls it and Sadie asks, ‘Why are you up in my business?’ And by the end of the episode, they’re working on this story together. So it’s really leading the personal into the professional.“
