The Girls on the Bus Boss Reveals Season 2 Plans, Including Potential for an Arrowverse ‘Crossover’

TVLINE | You set up several storylines and left some open-ended in this finale. So I have to ask you: What are the prospects of a second season?
We wrote this so that you would feel like you had a satisfying journey, in case the landscape of television demanded that we only do one. But because [executive producer/author] Amy [Chozick] and I are optimists and really do love these girls, we did want to provide the opportunity to show where we could go, and we do have tons of thoughts for where we would take it in a second season. We don’t know what’s going to happen, but we’d certainly love it.

TVLINE | Have you gotten any indications from the execs how it’s performing on Max?
We haven’t, but that is somewhat standard in the streaming world. Again, it’s funny, because I am much more used to Nielsen ratings still, and it’s a whole different world over there. So I know it only recently hit the first 28 days, but we haven’t gotten any actual information when it comes to that. We just like seeing that we are in the Top 10 a lot of the times, and that’s exciting. I’m more excited when I’m like, “O, we made Quote of the Week in this random person’s article,” because that means random people are watching it, and I really like that. [Laughs]

TVLINE | Have you and Amy talked at all about what a Season 2 would look like?
Yes, we have. Essentially, we would be going into the general [election], and the biggest shift in terms of what that looks like, which is kind of funny, is just from the setting standpoint. The girls get off the bus and onto a plane, which I did not know, and I thought that was really interesting.

Then we’re following the general, so we’d be following our Hot White Guy storyline, and we began to crack what his deep, dark secret is, which we sort of planted in the episode [with] Kimberlyn and Eric’s wedding. We finally meet the incumbent Republican, so that would be a piece of the story. We’d see what the landscape of our fictitious world actually is. And from the macro piece, the girls are, essentially, trying to dig up the dirt on Hot White Guy and find out all of his deep, dark secrets…

Then on personal levels, we actually have way more stories. One of the things that I was very excited about was we would be adding Grace’s daughter to the bus. So we would get that pairing. We’d get to bring those two women together onto the plane. We’d finally have Loafers and Sadie trying to maintain some sort of a relationship now that he’s out of the business and it’s no longer a conflict of interest. We had a bunch of stuff that I hope we get to implement.

TVLINE | You mentioned that Sadie and the others are going to be digging up all of Hot White Guy’s secrets. We learn in the finale about him being dishonorably discharged. So that was just the tip of the iceberg?
We had juicier secrets than that. That was just the tip of the iceberg. In the finale, Grace is singularly tracking down the woman in the car crash and who she is, and why did she disappear? So pieces of that would be also, potentially, coming back.

And meanwhile, of course, the big thing is we’re flip-flopping Kimberlyn and Lola’s experience completely, where Kimberlyn is now working in the space that Lola occupies, in that she’s trying to build a brand all by herself, while she’s married, while she’s potentially carrying her first child maybe, maybe not? And Lola, obviously, as the fish out of water working for Wall Street Journal, that was one of the funnier things we could imagine. [Laughs]

TVLINE | Casting Scott Foley, who’s very beloved by TV viewers, and then revealing his character to be this bad guy politician feels like a very deliberate choice. Were you counting on viewers wanting to love him, especially in the beginning of the season?
I count on Scott Foley for everything, because I think he is so unbelievably talented, and I think he is often viewed as Mr. Handsome, which sort of was the joke, right? He’s Hot White Guy, but the greatest thing about him is he is so much more. He has so much depth. I’m completely ready to see Scott Foley play the president in any number of television series, [but] hopefully ours. Yes, I think people always go in sort of assuming and looking for some version of Noel [from Felicity], which, let’s be honest, that was when I first fell in love with Mr. Foley, as well. But if you look at his body of work, it’s really tremendous, and he’s just so smart. He was just so perfect. He was who we wanted from minute one.

TVLINE | At the end of the episode, Sadie’s ultimately released by the FBI, and she’s given the others all this information that she has accumulated about Hayden. Where does that leave her in terms of that storyline? Can she still investigate him, or do the others have to carry on without her?
No, she definitely can still investigate here, and there was a whole other piece that we had played with, and it’s actually funny because, originally, I think part of it was in our finale, and then we realized the finale was becoming burdened with so, so much plot and so many things happening. We’re like, “You know what? That would be better in the event that we do get a Season 2.” But there’s also this idea that Sadie was in the room when Dick Braun dies. So we were also going to play with what misinformation looks like when a journalist is at the center of it, because she’s there, he falls back, and she scurries out. So we were also playing with the notion of beyond what the FBI was bothering her with, she’s also going to be at the center of her own potential misinformation s–tstorm at the top of Season 2. But from a journalistic standpoint, she would be able to do all the investigations with the girls, as well. When she’s released, she’s released.

TVLINE | And we are to assume that Dick Braun’s allergic reaction was fatal?
Yes, he is dead.

TVLINE | I wasn’t sure. I didn’t see the body. I never trust when I don’t see the body.
That is so true, and I guess you’re right. We could have pivoted. It was so engrained in my brain because it was a huge piece of it that he died. Like, we had all this stuff, and to be completely honest with you, it just never made it into the final cut because there was too much information, and we felt we didn’t need it. But yes, the intention was that he died.

TVLINE | Moving onto romantic relationships, there’s this really lovely scene where Malcolm tells Sadie that she’s his home, and they kiss. And yet, when she’s being questioned by the FBI, she says, “Is he really my boyfriend?” Is she just playing with the FBI there? Or is she truly uncertain of where they stand in that moment?
No, I think that was a little tongue-in-cheek. I mean, yes, she’s playing with the FBI, but also, it sort of speaks to the original Sadie, of someone who’s always going to be just a little bit neurotic and always just a little bit gun-shy about relationships. But completely, our intention would be to see what that relationship looks like in Season 2, when they can actually have one.

TVLINE | I appreciated that the abortion story in Episode 8 didn’t cause this huge rift between them. Did you see that experience as, ultimately, bringing them together in a way?
To me, it showed the maturity of the relationship and the respect between the two characters, and his reaction was loving and to be there for her, and I appreciated that she told him. That was a debate in the [writers’] room: Does she owe it to him to tell him? And it really came down to whether or not she owes it to him from a political or from a pro-choice standpoint is one argument, but whether she would tell Loafers, it speaks to how she feels about him and who he is to her at one point in the game, and that’s why she tells him. So yeah, I do think, in a way, the experience does bring them closer, because they were so like-minded and respectful of each other, which is what we would hope for in a situation like that.

TVLINE | At the end of the finale, he’s in the Off the Record group text thread, helping them out. Is this his new journey? Or is there going to be a new professional arc for him, another kind of job?
I don’t think he can be working for Hot White Guy. Then we get into he’s had the same job now for three different candidates. But we were going to figure out a way to sort of keep him adjacent to the world so that their relationship could flourish, and we could foster it and play it for real and still make sense as to why he is in and around the campaign or in and around the world of DC politics in that way. But that one piece, we hadn’t locked in. We locked in that we wanted to play a relationship between them in Season 2, but we didn’t lock in what his occupation would be, but I do think it would be a shift.

TVLINE | I also want to touch on Kimmy and her husband, because the two of them had a big fight, but then we see him bringing her coffee as she’s working from home. What is the state of their marriage?
We love the reality of that situation and what that marriage looks like. Again, it felt like these two people genuinely love each other, and it’s when she gets to the point in the finale when she realizes, “Yes, I could be having this conversation with you, Lola, but the truth is I can’t make any huge decisions about my life until I talk to Eric, because that’s when it all feels real.” And so, even the moment where he’s angry at her in the bar, that’s real. You fight, you make up, you fight, you make up. And our intention was to keep their relationship going, and we did want to add another potential hurdle of how hard it is to start your own business while trying to start a family. So if the first season was how hard it is to try to get married while you’re inching your way into the door, Season 2 for Kimberlyn would be, potentially, starting a family with Eric while she’s in the middle of all of this, and what does that look like, and what does that do to him? We really loved him, and Kyle [Vincent Terry] was so game, and he would also be sort of fun to pull more into our world.

TVLINE | What can you say about what Grace’s journey might be in a potential Season 2? You mentioned that her daughter was going to be on the bus. Is she becoming Grace’s intern, in a way?
Yes. There’s a documentary [Journeys With George by Nancy Pelosi’s daughter Alexandra Pelosi], where she was filming George W. Bush on Air Force One. It’s this great documentary, and that was sort of the inspiration [for] having the daughter sort of coming on. And yes, it’s slightly interning for Grace, but also becoming a videographer, sort of creating a documentary of it.

If Grace’s whole storyline in the first season is she is not balancing work [and] life at all, she has chosen work, and life didn’t come in until the very end, we want to sort of see what it’s like when her life is sitting on top of her work like that, and what are the choices she makes. And we also did have a fun sort of soapy idea in relation to that person that she mentioned to her daughter, when she explains the mistakes she made when she was a child. We sort of wanted to introduce that character in a big, splashy, fun way.

TVLINE | Lola’s such an independent, free-thinking character. So how do you maintain sort of that Lola factor if she’s going to be working at this big organization?
I don’t want to speak for Amy, but I know that was one of the storylines that she’s the most excited about… It’s a larger metaphor, right, because it really is what it means to grow up. It’s like coming out of college in your twenties, there’s all these incredible ideas and passions, but at some point, your thirties step in, and it’s figuring out how to get your voice heard inside the world and get things done. Not to, like, crush idealism, because that’s certainly not the goal, but it’s how does someone like Lola make Wall Street Journal work for her? And who are the people that she meets in that space that change her opinion about certain things? Because I think that’s also the fun part of being young is, like, your opinions go all over the place, and you can flip-flop all you want. That’s the joy of being young. But it’s not flip-flopping, it’s the journey of discovery. That was a really exciting part for us, to see Lola not hating every part of this corporate world that she has been attacking in Season 1 and trying to wrestle with that in her own way, and what does that mean? I always think of The Big Chill, in that way. It’s that second part of life, where they’re like, “What happened to us?” and some of them hate who they are, and some of them are like, “This is great who we are.”

TVLINE | As someone who covered the Arrowverse for a very long time, I was hoping that we would get a Melissa Benoist and Tala Ashe scene, kind of a little Arrowverse crossover moment. Was that something that you ever considered doing? Or it was just too impossible because their storylines weren’t quite together?
Yeah, storylines never quite crossed. It’s funny, because we did very much think about who would make the perfect veep for Hot White Guy, and it did seem like Tala would be the one.

TVLINE | So there’s still a possibility we’ll see her in Season 2?
Oh, for sure, yeah.