The first several weeks in the writers room of The Girls on the Bus, the Max series about female journalists covering a presidential campaign, went like this: “Oh, what if Sadie sleeps with a candidate?” Me: “Absolutely not.” “How about a Democratic strategist?” “Hard no. She cannot sleep with a source.” “Well, what if she falls for the bartender at the Marriott?” Me: “Doesn’t work. They’re in a different Marriott every night.” Finally, my co-creator Julie Plec said, “Amy, it’s TV, she has to fuck someone.”
The more we brainstormed the romantic storyline of our protagonist, Sadie McCarthy, a reporter for a fictional paper of record played by Melissa Benoist, the more it started to feel like onscreen female journalists couldn’t catch a break in love. If we wanted our…