"I like her, but not in this" is a phrase I found myself saying a few times recently -- once about Sydney Sweeney (an actress I admire) in Anyone But You (a movie I didn't like), but even more emphatically about the cast of The Girls on the Bus, a new Max series that my colleague Eric Deggans ably reviewed this week.
Melissa Benoist, Carla Gugino, Christina Elmore and Natasha Behnam in the Max series The Girls on the Bus.Nicole Rivelli/Max
The show, in brief, is inspired by ("based on" would be a stretch) journalist Amy Chozick's book Chasing Hillary, about covering the 2016 election. Here, there are four women journalists we follow as they cover the Democratic primary. Presumably, another season could get into the general election, although this seems like a show that would struggle mightily to depict Republicans (as Aaron Sorkin did on The West Wing).
At the center is Sadie (Melissa Benoist), a journalist presumably born in maybe the late 1980s who idolizes only Hunter S. Thompson (?) and occasionally sports an unironic fedora (??) that mercifully does not have a tag in the band that says "PRESS" or "SCOOP." She works for a paper we will call the The Schmoo Schmork Shmimes. Her best friend and mentor is Grace (Carla Gugino), who works for The Schmashington Schmost. Then there's Kimberlyn (Christina Elmore), who works for an outlet called Liberty Direct News, which you might think of as Fox-News-ish, but actually feels more like one of the channels higher up on the cable listing, if you get my drift. And Lola (Natasha Behnam) is a popular Instagram personality who is constantly doing sponsored content and is on the press bus despite having only the hazy backing of a manager-agent type and openly advocating for one candidate over all the others. Naturally, they all become pals.
None of this makes a lick of sense for a whole lot of reasons. Sadie not only is sleeping with someone she's covering (a trope the show attempts to both deploy and critique, which never works for a second), but she lusts after another person she's covering at one point. Grace is the only one of these women who seems to be actually working very much, although she is responsible for representing the trope of the mother who constantly worries that she's neglecting her children because of her job. Kimberlyn seems to have landed at Liberty Direct News despite having no discernible political opinions except that she likes to wax rhapsodic about the free market, which seems like a way to tell the audience she's a Republican without telling them anything about what that means to her that might interfere with the "these women discover all the common ground they share" theme. And Lola, as fun as she is, seems like she really could use some more training, which makes it a little harder to invest in a story about her realization that she's been great all along.
But: I watched this whole show when the screeners came. I watched it in a couple of big bites, and that's because it's very winning, even though I don't think it's very good. Gugino and Benoist are two of the most reliable actresses we have as far as taking pretty straight-down-the-middle TV and making it a lot of fun to watch. The character of Sadie drove me bonkers, but I stayed with her solely because of the performance. That's doubly true of Grace: I would watch Grace on her own for probably several seasons, even though I would roll my eyes at her constantly. And Elmore and Behnam are actresses I know less well but reacted to similarly -- they are watchable even when the show is silly.
Moreover, this project comes from megaproducer Greg Berlanti's shop, via Julie Plec (credited as a creator along with Chozick), who is probably best known for The Vampire Diaries and other CW projects. I would expect a likable show from either of them, let alone both of them. And there are a couple of places where the story does have some heft, particularly in an episode about reproductive rights that's willing to go in directions TV usually doesn't, and hasn't, ever.
Mostly, though, trying to do a galpal dramedy in the dual settings of politics and journalism at this particular moment in time was always going to require a tightrope walk that just isn't what this show is going for. And so, in watching it, I found myself almost disassociating from everything I know about the world and trying to think of it as pure fantasy. That might have been easier if I hadn't known it was "inspired" by anything real at all.
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We Recommend
We're going to talk about the Lindsay Lohan Netflix romcom Irish Wish(as well as a couple other recent genre entries) on the show pretty soon, but let me just say: If you're the kind of person who can swallow a silly story if the settings and the leads are appealing, this just might be up your alley.
Maris Kreizman at LitHub takes on the idea of turning the publishing of books over to "freelancers," which in this case means gig workers. I have to say, as someone who has written books, I think I benefit from the team I work with having stability and institutional knowledge, and even if I got a bigger cut, I don't think I would price-shop for something like an editor. So consider me Team Maris.
Some of the blogs (yes, blogs) that I have loved over the years are gone, and some have been taken over by evil forces. But some are thriving, and Oscars week is a great week to revisit both Go Fug Yourself and Tom + Lorenzo. Fashion commentary that combines actual knowledge with sharp wit? I am always grateful.
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Justice Smith and David Alan Grier in The American Society of Magical Negroes.Focus Features
We covered the Oscars, of course, capping off an unusually compact awards season that featured a delayed Emmy ceremony in January. I wrote about the night's big takeaways, and all four of your PCHH hosts met up with our tireless producers after midnight to wrap the whole thing up. And now: to wait an unusually short time before we do it all over again.
Aisha and I shook things up for ourselves by talking to jarrett hill and Ronald Young, Jr. about Love is Blind, a show that is so deeply weird I honestly don't know what to say.
If you've been a PCHH listener for a while, you know that Stephen Thompson is one of the world's great fans of the Kung Fu Panda franchise. So: no surprise that he, along with Short Wave host Regina G. Barber and our own former producer (and ICYMI host) Candice Lim, talked about Kung Fu Panda 4.
Aisha talked to Reanna Cruz and Jordan Crucchiola about the Kristen Stewart movie Love Lies Bleeding, which, as they point out, is something some of Stewart's fans have been looking for.
Aisha also wrote an absolutely fascinating essay about the film The American Society of Magical Negroes that I commend to you most highly.
I did not write about what is going on with Kate Middleton (because I have no idea other than what has been said publicly), but I did try to dig into why this moment seems like such an indication of the ways in which palace PR is ill-equipped and unprepared for the era in which it now finds itself. I also got to talk toAll Things Considered about it, which made two encounters with them this week, the first to talk about -- of course -- the Oscars.
What's Making Us Happy
Every week on the show, we talk about some other things out in the world that have been giving us joy lately. Here they are:
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