Found Family: An Interview with ‘The Girls on the Bus’ Co-Creator Amy Chozick

THE GIRLS ON THE BUS invites viewers to hit the campaign trail alongside four female journalists, each of them different in their reporting styles and personalities. The story centers on Sadie McCarthy (Melissa Benoist), a journalist who romanticizes a bygone era of campaign reporting and scraps her whole life for a shot at covering a presidential candidate for a paper of record. Sadie joins the bus and eventually bonds with three female competitors, Grace (Carla Gugino), Lola (Natasha Behnam), and Kimberlyn (Christina Elmore). Despite their differences, the women become a found family with a front-row seat to the greatest soap opera in town - the battle for the White House.

Working on the road is a hard grind for anyone. But couple that with being a female journalist covering the political trail, and all the fun twists and turns that get thrown in such as making big life-changing decisions on a whim to just getting along with your neighbor - you get The Girls on the Bus. While these journalists each have their unique points of view - yet what's quite refreshing with this ensemble of characters, is that they take a moment to listen and have discourse for a better understanding of what's being presented on the other side. 

Amy Chozick spoke with Script about the inspiration behind her drama series The Girls on the Bus, her creative process with Julie Plec and the writers' room, the representation of women in journalism, the show's thematic anchor, and so much more. 

This interview has been edited for content and clarity.

Sadie Dean: Knowing that this was inspired by your book, what was that process like taking the essence from your own lived experiences and developing this into a show with this ensemble of characters and that creative collaboration with Julie Plec?

Amy Chozick: The show is very loosely inspired by the book. The book was essentially like a jumping-off place for a fictional world. So, we knew very early on, we didn't want to relive the 2016 campaign. We really wanted to focus on this chapter of the book “The Girls on the Bus,” about the camaraderie that forms on the campaign trail among women who in their normal lives would probably never know each other much less be like a found family. And Greg Berlanti and Sarah Schechter were very intrigued by the fact that women were doing these jobs. Now, this used to be the boys on the bus, and you think of like the swashbuckling male journalists, the Hunter S. Thompson's. Now, it was the purview of women and it just felt like a really rich world to fictionalize.

Julie Plec signed on and we schemed up these four very different women we wanted them to be very different, not just background, ethnicity, political stories, generationally didn't see a lot of intergenerational female friendships on TV - we wanted that to come through but also just make them completely different types of journalists. So that we could have those debates that happen on the bus about everything from politics to journalism to life to marriage, gender, and all the hot-button issues that…all those debates that I either heard happening in my own newsroom or Julie got into over brunch - we were able to just put all those debates into the girls mouths so that was really fun.

The great thing about writing the show was it was much less this thing happened to me. And now I'm going to just write…it was much more I would come into the writers' room and think about the conversations I wish I had, or the moments I wish would have happened. Because you can actually do that in fiction, you know, and very rarely was I alone with Hillary Clinton on her campaign bus or alone with Barack Obama in an elevator - it's just not the kind of access that you get covering a candidate. So, I was able to fictionalize these conversations that I had only had in my head for a long time, like, what would that candidate say to me if they really were off the record, and we were alone? And so that was actually the most fun. It was less like, let me recreate this thing that happened to me and more like let me make my fantasy come true.

Sadie: There is something about the ‘what if ‘as a storyteller, especially in that kind of situation, and how would you react in that situation, too?

Amy: Yeah, totally. And I think, Sadie is the most like me, but the beauty of television is that it’s collaborative. So, I think that she has a lot of Julie's characteristics. A lot of Rina Mimoun, who was my partner - she was a collection of all of our neuroses. [laughs] And it's funny, we all came to it with slightly different opinions. Rina, I think is much more idealistic about politics. I think I'm probably more cynical, having kind of lived it as close as I did. And we ended up where we did with Sadie.

Sadie: In terms of the character development in the show and seeing these women who have wildly different perspectives about the world and life – but they end up creating this unbreakable sisterhood by the finale. And likewise, you’re also covering a lot of ground about hot-button issues with our current political system – were there specific thematic elements or buttons you wanted to talk about within the show while interweaving that with their individual character development?

Amy: Yeah, thank you. That's a great question. One of the things that is also a gift to television is that you get to create the world as you'd like it to be not as it is, and we definitely wanted our tone to be hopeful. We look at Mike Nichols movies, Broadcast News, The Paper with Michael Keaton, these are funny, big-hearted movies about journalism, Almost Famous to me is a journalism movie - those were our references.

One of the things when the show first came out, there were people who said there's no way that Kimberlyn and Lola would ever be friends. And I think that is true. And it's certainly true online. They would never be friends. Probably true in life if you met at a dinner party or something. 

But the beauty of the device of the bus is it forces these women to be together - you're staying at the same hotel night after night, eating at the same breakfast buffet, you're on the same bus for hours, days and days and hours on end, living out of a suitcase, you have to stop seeing the person as the annoying Gen Z progressive and the horrible Fox News conservative, those things sort of chip away and you have to start seeing each other as humans, it just happens. You're planning your wedding, you're letting your husband down, your kid is yelling at you - all of the things you start to see people as humans. So, I think the bus was our device to really like make these women have to see each other.

And the other thing about women, as you know, it's not like they're gonna be like besties by Episode Two, they hate each other in Episode…it's an evolution. One of the relationships I really love is Grace and Lola because they're the most to me, of course, Kimberlyn is a conservative, you wouldn't expect her to be rooming with the young progressive - but I think in terms of generationally, their views on the world, like how on earth would Grace be friends with Lola? And they start to not only become friends, but I think they both start to see journalism differently because of each other. By the end, Lola really values what old-school journalists do and the impact that they can make. And I think Grace, realizes what a huge platform Lola has with her TikTok and how journalism is changing.

Sadie: Was there a thematic anchor for breaking down this first season? There’s a line that Sadie says at the end of Episode 10, “The truth matters,’ and that felt so significant to the characters and the show as a whole.

Amy: I love that you picked up on that because at the very beginning of the pilot, she says, “These days, the truth is whatever you want to believe so here's mine.” So, I definitely think truth is a big theme. But I think that even fits into the larger theme that we had, which is by the time the girls got the job, they couldn't be like the boys on the bus, they had to be better, right? So by the time the girls get the job, the boys on the bus - they were drinking with the candidates then they would come home and their families would hail them as heroes - there's no way those men got hell for missing a ballet recital or not being there for their kids. So, it's like now that women have the jobs and the journalism business is dying, the candidate hardly talks to them, nobody believes what they write. 

So it's like all of these things to me fall in the larger theme of they have zero margin for error - and I think by the time women finally break through, either the careers or the industry is dying or you see it even Hollywood by the time they let a ton of diverse young female writers and writers of color have broken in over the peak TV era, and now there's a scale back and the industry is struggling, and it’s like, ‘Damn, we just got in the door.’

So I think there is something about that and I think it's something that Sadie has to realize because she's been romanticizing the boys on the bus and then I think you saw on episode nine when she tells Hunter to go away and that's part of her realizing, ‘I can't be like you. We live in a nation of enraged fact-checkers. I can't write the kind of Gonzo journalism you wrote.’ And then it's like when you do break the story who's gonna believe it? You live in this strange era when people don't trust the media.

Sadie: Speaking of Hunter S. Thompson and incorporating magical realism, how did that come about incorporating that inner voice for Sadie?

Amy: Julie and I first realized maybe every episode is a different boy on the bus. We introduce Hunter S. Thompson, we introduce Richard Ben Kramer, there was one version where Truman Capote appeared to her and Joan Didion - basically the ghosts of journalism past were appearing and we were like, ‘this is getting confusing for people.’ So, we settled on just Hunter.

And to me, Hunter is a couple of things. I think a lot of writers have a loud inner voice…so, I wanted Sadie to have that loud inner voice. How do you articulate that inner voice? And so, we thought Hunter was fun because he's the devil on her shoulder. He's the one that's like, 'Go, Gonzo. Who cares about being objective,' and then she has her more rational self, 'Don't do it. Sadie, you're gonna get fired.' So, I thought it was very fun to get into like, that dynamic of Sadie's kind of inner dialogue through the Hunter S. Thompson character. And he’s not Hunter really. He's Sadie's imagination. It's her brain talking to her. 

The Girls on the Bus is available on Max.