Melissa Benoist Hits the Campaign Trail in ‘The Girls on the Bus’

Melissa Benoist has made a habit of playing journalists on television.

She spent six years as the hero of “Supergirl,” Kara Danvers, who works in media when she’s not saving the world. Now Benoist is taking on the role of a campaign reporter named Sadie McCarthy in the Max series “The Girls on the Bus,” a very loose adaptation of the former New York Times reporter Amy Chozick’s nonfiction book “Chasing Hillary.”

But Benoist does not think she’d be a good fit for the profession. Asked about the choice of some political reporters to refrain from voting in the elections they cover, she explained in a phone interview that she would be a “terrible journalist.”

“I’m too emotional,” she said. “I’d for sure be biased.”

“The Girls on the Bus,” created by Chozick and Julie Plec (“The Vampire Diaries”), is a fictional and frothy account of the lives of women chronicling a series of Democratic presidential contenders on their way to the national convention. Benoist’s Sadie works for a New York Times stand-in called The New York Sentinel, and is given an opportunity to return to the road after being publicly embarrassed during the previous election cycle when a video of her crying after her candidate lost, a journalistic no-no, went viral.

The show has a fantastical bent, and not just because Sadie has conversations with the ghost of Hunter S. Thompson (P.J. Sosko). Despite arriving in an election year and taking inspiration from Chozick’s book about covering Hillary Clinton, the political landscape of the show looks very different from our current one. Sadie and her cohorts grapple with familiar topics, but they do so in a sort of parallel universe where the bonds they form while tracking down sources is at the center of the tale.

For Benoist, the show is her first series regular role since “Supergirl” and her first venture as a producer. In an interview, she discussed her crash course in political reporting and why that word “girl” keeps following her around. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.