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.”
