\n<\/p>\n
\u201cThe Girls on the Bus\u201d is a fizzy recasting of the campaign-trail memoir \u201cChasing Hillary\u201d 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.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s a very un-Hillary detail, and it foretells a very un-Hillary downfall. Shortly after Chozick\u2019s reporter stand-in, Sadie McCarthy (Melissa Benoist), eagerly hops onto Bennett\u2019s bus, she finds her candidate sidelined by a sex scandal (and not her husband\u2019s).<\/p>\n
These are silly choices, and savvy ones. Only when Clinton\u2019s baggage has been dumped is \u201cThe Girls on the Bus\u201d 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. \u201cThe Girls on the Bus,\u201d now streaming on Max, is one of the first shows about presidential politics that is forced to contend with her absence. But it can\u2019t quite quit her.<\/p>\n
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\u2019s politics, her path, her bearing, her wardrobe, her haircut \u2014 these character details could be mirrored or mocked or refuted onscreen, but they could not be ignored. <\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
When Cherry Jones played the first female president on \u201c24,\u201d beginning in 2008, she told a reporter<\/a>, unprompted: \u201cShe\u2019s not Hillary. She has nothing to do with Hillary.\u201d But when Lynda Carter played an (alien!) president on \u201cSupergirl\u201d in 2016, she said<\/a>, \u201cI used Hillary to prepare.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Of course, Jones\u2019s president on \u201c24\u201d had something to do with Hillary. She was a serious person and a plausible choice. Before \u201c24″ \u2014 before Clinton\u2019s first presidential run \u2014 the ascension of a fictional female president was generally pitched as a freak accident. In the 1924 silent comedy \u201cThe Last Man on Earth,\u201d a \u201cmasculitis\u201d pandemic kills virtually all men, leading a woman, \u201cPresidentess,\u201d to rule witchlike over an unkempt White House.<\/p>\n More than 70 years later, the 1996 disaster comedy \u201cMars Attacks!\u201d 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 \u201cKisses for My President\u201d shows a woman elected to the presidency, but then her body itself creates a national crisis: She becomes pregnant and resigns.<\/p>\n 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. <\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n