The Girls on the Bus

As ridiculous as the show can be, it’s also addictively fun. Come for the journalism, stay for the laugh-out-loud plot twists, that kind of thing.

It handles serious topics, from sexism and racism to abortion and corruption, in a way that feels both raw and palatable while never taking away from the show’s watchability and enjoyability.

The show has the most fun when it lets the Girls hang out together, be it on the bus or in one of the many nondescript hotel bars they frequent along the way. Benoist, Gugino, Elmore, and Behnam gel nicely from the outset, and they bring a sharpness to their characters’ many sparring sessions over their divergent worldviews.

The dialogue in The Girls on the Bus is bluntly written, the characters broadly archetypal, and the social messaging incredibly on the nose. And yet there’s something about the earnest intentions and likable performers that keeps it all watchable.

There’s more complexity than you might expect, much of it pertaining to the professional myopia from which the show self-consciously suffers. And what the series lacks in moral seriousness — and forfeits by teleporting to a reality with no Clinton or Donald Trump — it compensates for by gamely and sometimes even rigorously investigating the mechanics of fallibility.

The further The Girls on the Bus gets into its storylines, the more likeable the central characters become, and the more invested you become in what happens with them.

It comes together as a whole that’s not really a guilty pleasure — for the millionth time, stop being guilty about the things you like — but definitely one where you have to wade through eye-rolling moments to get to the things that are enjoyable.

“The Girls on the Bus,” which follows four journalists who form a friend group on the Democratic presidential campaign trail, is so well-acted by its main cast that it keeps promising to be ceiling-breaking or otherwise profound. But the new series ends up squarely middle of the road and all too ordinary.

“Girls on the Bus” devolves into a CW-style drama that occasionally addresses the slow death of journalism on the most perfunctory level.

The show is stuck with the worst of both worlds: its frequent silliness feels inappropriate, while its occasional grandstanding comes off as entirely out of its depth.