KALEY CUOCO TAKES FLIGHT
Sitcom star delivers a glossy, twisty, energetic small-screen murder mystery
The Flight Attendant Crave
The first few minutes of The Flight Attendant are as vivid and glamorous as the life Cassie Bowden (Kaley Cuoco) projects to the world as she travels it. She hops from one blurry night out to the next, trading cities and men with practised abandon.
But when she wakes up in Bangkok after a blurry one-night stand to find her date (Michiel Huisman) horribly murdered, she does what most every rational human would do: She panics.
Thousands of miles from home, with no memory of the end of her night, Cassie doesn't know what else to do but clean up what she can and tear the hell out of there. As her entire life looks ready to collapse in front of her eyes, the camera tilts, the music becomes unbearably sharp and the focus shifts just enough to let us know that things are about to get very bad, very quickly.
Cassie flies back to New York, hoping never to have to think about it again.
After all, she tells herself and most everyone she meets, she's just a drunk party girl flight attendant.
That characterization, to The Flight Attendant's intriguing credit, ends up being both true and false. In the four episodes screened for critics (there are eight in total), creator Steve Yockey writes Cassie as a believable mess in the aftermath.
So, no, The Flight Attendant isn't about some supernaturally smart woman who witnesses a crime and gets spurred into action. It's about a wildly messy person who stumbles into something truly horrific and has to deal with it, a combination that threatens to bring down the carefree persona she's so carefully crafted over the years.
The story is pitch black, especially when Cassie has to confront the dark corners of her memory she's long suppressed. But with Cuoco at its centre both as actor and executive producer, it has enough of a sense of humour to keep from becoming annoyingly grim.
Cassie's story would be more than enough to keep the show moving, but almost no one in The Flight Attendant is exactly what they seem. Everyone's so shady that tallying up all the salacious details can make the show seem flat-out ridiculous. But the actors bring enough comic spark to their roles that it doesn't really matter as long as you're along for the bumpy ride. And the pacing of the show makes it hard to stop watching even if you try.
It quickly becomes a surreal noir with a solid screwball performance at its centre. It's just swapped the traditional hard-boiled, probably alcoholic detective for a scatterbrained, probably alcoholic flight attendant.
Pulpy and surreal, it's the TV version of a page-turner you'd pick up in an airport for a flight and accidentally tear through in the first couple of hours. Hopefully, your trip wouldn't end up like Cassie's. But if it does — hey, at least you'll know exactly what not to do.