“The Girls on the Bus” is a fizzy recasting of the campaign-trail memoir “Chasing Hillary” by Amy Chozick, who covered the 2016 election for The New York Times. But it is not a show about Hillary Clinton. Immediately, it takes pains to banish her persona from the screen. The Democratic front-runner of the pilot episode is a governor named Caroline Bennett (Joanna Gleason), and though she is a baby boomer (check) in a pantsuit (check), she also writes romance novels under a pseudonym.
It’s a very un-Hillary detail, and it foretells a very un-Hillary downfall. Shortly after Chozick’s reporter stand-in, Sadie McCarthy (Melissa Benoist), eagerly hops onto Bennett’s bus, she finds her candidate sidelined by a sex scandal (and not her husband’s).
These are silly choices, and savvy ones. Only when Clinton’s baggage has been dumped is “The Girls on the Bus” free to repave the trail into an escapist romp. For the better part of two decades, Clinton has gripped the cultural imagination around the idea of a first female president. Hundreds of millions of Americans, of several generations, both supporters and critics, imagined it would be her. Screenwriters foresaw it, too. “The Girls on the Bus,” now streaming on Max, is one of the first shows about presidential politics that is forced to contend with her absence. But it can’t quite quit her.
As Clinton ran and lost and ran and lost in the real world, television universes selected a succession of fictionalized Hillarys to occupy their replica Oval Offices. Clinton’s politics, her path, her bearing, her wardrobe, her haircut — these character details could be mirrored or mocked or refuted onscreen, but they could not be ignored.
When Cherry Jones played the first female president on “24,” beginning in 2008, she told a reporter, unprompted: “She’s not Hillary. She has nothing to do with Hillary.” But when Lynda Carter played an (alien!) president on “Supergirl” in 2016, she said, “I used Hillary to prepare.”
Of course, Jones’s president on “24” had something to do with Hillary. She was a serious person and a plausible choice. Before “24″ — before Clinton’s first presidential run — the ascension of a fictional female president was generally pitched as a freak accident. In the 1924 silent comedy “The Last Man on Earth,” a “masculitis” pandemic kills virtually all men, leading a woman, “Presidentess,” to rule witchlike over an unkempt White House.
More than 70 years later, the 1996 disaster comedy “Mars Attacks!” ends with a similar joke: After all the legitimate leaders are killed by Martians, it is the teenage first daughter (Natalie Portman) who assumes the role. In between, the 1964 comedy “Kisses for My President” shows a woman elected to the presidency, but then her body itself creates a national crisis: She becomes pregnant and resigns.
In the early 2000s, as Clinton jumped to the Senate after eight years as first lady, the archetype of the fictional female president transformed under her influence. Hillary, who possessed both personal drive and dynastic power, made a female president seem possible, even likely.
When “Commander in Chief” premiered in 2005, with Geena Davis as a statuesque Independent, the very notion of a female president had become so fused to Hillary’s imagined rise that conservative commentators accused the show of “subliminal socialist indoctrination” and “a nefarious plot to advance the notion of a Hillary Clinton presidency.” The show lasted just one season.
As it happened, the “notion of a Hillary Clinton presidency” would be advanced in Hollywood well beyond Clinton’s real-life losses: From 2017 to 2019, we saw a secretary of state (Téa Leoni) become the first female president on “Madame Secretary,” a first lady (Robin Wright) become the first female president on “House of Cards,” and a first lady turned U.S. senator (Bellamy Young) become the first female president on “Scandal.”
As Clinton’s television doubles proliferated, a pair of archetypes emerged. The female president was a most capable public servant, or she was an evil narcissist in thrall to power. In 2005, as Davis was confidently striding the White House halls in “Commander in Chief,” projecting her nonpartisan feminist swagger, Patricia Wettig in “Prison Break” was orchestrating a shadowy conspiracy, scheming to murder her way into the Oval Office.
These characters — the ultracompetent heroine and the morally flexible striver — seemed to have been forged from Americans’ polarized opinions of Clinton herself. The more complex versions of the character vacillate between those poles, and the rare achievement breaks from it: Julia Louis-Dreyfus is so delightful in “Veep” because her narcissism is matched only by her bumbling incompetence, which makes her just as undeserving of the presidency as the male politicians in her orbit.
Notably, few of these characters are actually elected to the presidency. In “Commander in Chief” and “Prison Break,” a female vice president is sworn in after a sitting male president dies in office; a similar plot unfolds in “House of Cards” and “Veep,” except she gets the job after the president resigns. And on “Scandal,” Young’s character takes office when her winning rival is assassinated during his victory speech.
In these alternate histories, a female president is not depicted as a total catastrophe (in the “Scandal” universe, a rival’s assassination is a fairly standard turn of events), but her rise is still somewhat accidental, unwanted or unearned. Nobody actually has to vote for her.
These convoluted ascensions speak to the central contradiction of Clinton and her fictional counterparts: It was easier to imagine her being the president than becoming the president. America could envision her as a leader as long as she could overcome the suspicion that she wanted it too much. She was considered at once inevitable and unelectable. Onscreen, the paradox of female ambition could be instantly resolved with a fatal heart attack or a spray of bullets. The fake first female president could be depicted as appropriately humble (she never even wanted to be president!) or else nakedly ambitious (of course she wanted it, and she didn’t have to convince voters otherwise). Not so in real life.
Barring a truly soap-operatic twist, Hillary Clinton will not be America’s first female president. Where does pop culture’s imagination go from here? “The Girls on the Bus” pitches it in a few directions. When the front-runner, Caroline Bennett, drops out, two women emerge in her place: the wry Gen X senator Felicity Walker (Hettienne Park) and the millennial waitress turned democratic socialist Althea Abdi (Tala Ashe).
It sometimes feels like these women have been studiously constructed to tick various diversity boxes, representing a range of generations and implied backgrounds, but even they cannot totally escape Hillary’s shadow: At a key moment, one of them wears a suffragist white suit.
But at least there are three of them. One reason Hillary’s pop-cultural omnipresence felt staid and oppressive was that it suggested that politics had room only for her. Now that she’s gone, it’s become possible for multiple women to rise.
