‘The Flight Attendant’ is dark and maddening
“The Flight Attendant,” a new series on HBO Max, is slick and disposable entertainment, with occasional feints toward something a little deeper than its surface gloss.
That also describes its main character, Cassie Bowden, pretty well. She’s played by Kaley Cuoco, who is also an executive producer of the show, which Steve Yockey adapted from Chris Bohjalian’s novel. We meet Cassie, a flight attendant, in a montage of her drunken globe-trotting exploits. She has fun. A lot of fun. She drinks booze. A lot of booze.
On a flight to Bangkok she meets Alex
‘The Flight Attendant’
Streaming on HBO Max. (Michiel Huisman), an American businessman. They hook up (although such liaisons are frowned upon) and enjoy a drunken night of drunken sex before drunkenly falling asleep.
Again, Cassie drinks a lot.
When she wakes up, Alex is lying beside her, a dead, bloody mess. (It’s not a spoiler. It’s the premise of the show.) Cassie, understandably, freaks out, and begins making the sort of bad decisions that will define her and the show from then on.
Kaley Cuoco’s Cassie makes one bad decision after another
In this instance she cleans up any signs of her having been there and leaves, pretending nothing ever happened. What guy from the flight? But on the trip back to New York word spreads that the guy on the flight is dead, and the FBI wants to interview the flight crew.
In another brilliant move, Cassie tries to flee the airport. That goes nowhere, so she sits down to an interview with two agents (Merle Dandridge and Nolan Gerald Funk). Things probably could have gone worse for her if the agents’ clear disdain for one another — one of the better things in the series — didn’t keep distracting them. (Dandridge delivers a lecture about Funk’s character’s privilege right to his face that is fantastic, even if it seems like it doesn’t belong in the show.)
Then Alex shows up.
Or at least a kind of ghost version of him. Cassie keeps popping in and out of her memories, which may or may not be reliable. Being a blackout drunk tends to cloud your recollection. Alex guides her through them, offering hints, suggestions.
Back in regular life Cassie’s best friend Annie (Zosia Mamet), an attorney with a big firm that has some shady clients, offers to help. Much of this help involves begging Cassie to just stop doing anything, because everything she does casts doubt on her motive and is, frankly, kind of stupid.
Mamet is great, the absolute best thing about the show. Her Annie is caustic, a true smart-aleck (and truly smart), the perfect antidote to the often ditzy Cassie. I like her performance more than Cuoco’s, but they work well together. It’s tempting to say “The Flight Attendant” would be a better show with Annie as the main character, but she’s too concentrated a flavor to build a dish around.
Also, they’d have to call it “The Attorney.”
Anyway, HBO Max sent four of the series’ eight episodes. In each successive one Cassie digs herself deeper and deeper into what appears to be a much larger conspiracy than just, you know, a simple international murder.
How much you like the HBO Max show depends on how much you like Cuoco
But Cassie also digs deeper into her suppressed memories, like sharing a beer with her alcoholic father when she was a child. T.R. Knight does a lot with a little screen time as her brother, whose patience with her is wearing thin, and who has memories of his own.
The supporting cast in general
is strong, even if the characters’ story lines are not. Rosie Perez plays a fellow flight attendant who bizarrely seems to have her own shady deals going on. Griffin Matthews plays Shane, another coworker who accompanies Cassie on one of her more bone-headed misadventures. At this point Cassie’s antics are more grating than funny; Matthews saves it.
But it’s Cuoco who is front and center. How much you enjoy the show will depend on how much you like her, basically — and how willing you are to continue liking her character after her increasingly bad decisions begin to pile up. Cuoco handles the shifts in her character nicely, and it will be interesting to see how dark she goes in the upcoming episodes. The show has a vibe similar to “Dead to Me,” a black comedy with characters who can’t get out of their own way, but they’re so charming we don’t mind.
In its first four episodes, “The Flight Attendant” tests that premise. The final four will decide whether it holds up.