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THE FLIGHT ATTENDANT
Showrunner Steve Yockey maps out his vision for HBO Max’s darkly comedic crime thriller: ‘It’s like replacing Jimmy Stewart with Kaley Cuoco in a Hitchcock movie and watching what happens’
“Coming from a sitcom of 12 years, it was about trying to do something different — but not so different that people are like, ‘Why is she doing that?’ ” KALEY CUOCO
Aflight attendant named Cassie Bowden (Kaley Cuoco) spends a booze-fueled Bangkok evening with handsome stranger Alex Sokolof — and awakens the next morning in his bed to find that he has been brutally murdered. Since Cassie has no memory of the night’s events, she must put together the pieces herself before the authorities beat her to it. So goes the premise of HBO Max’s The Flight Attendant, based on Chris Bohjalian’s novel. When writer-producer Steve Yockey heard the “eccentric” pitch for HBO’s adaptation (Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment meets Fleabag), he knew he was up for the task. The accomplished playwright and Supernatural scribe put his own spin on the story by adding elements of comedy, fantasy and a heightened focus on female friendships. Yockey recently spoke to
THR about The Flight Attendant’s “unwieldy” tone and going off-book for season two.
Both you and Kaley have spoken about wanting to bring some levity to the source material, which is quite heavy. What inspired you to take a genre-blending direction?
Genre-blending is something that I tend to do in most of my work. And, you know, it’s Kaley Cuoco. She has this amazing effervescence and charm but also incredible timing and really strong comedic chops. It’s sort of like replacing Jimmy Stewart with Kaley Cuoco in a Hitchcock movie and watching what happens. Kind of like Pop Rocks, it creates this new sort of unwieldy tone. And then anything can happen, if you build the world right. It’s a bit of a balancing act, but I think it pays off for an audience in that the show then has the freedom to go to really, really dark places because it also has the humor to pull it back up.
Was that your vision for the show from the beginning?
Kaley did all the hard work — she went to the studio and the network, and they said, “We want to make this, we should find a writer.” By the time I came along, they put out a note that came with the book. [It] said something like, “We’re looking for Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment meets
Showrunner Steve Yockey maps out his vision for HBO Max’s darkly comedic crime thriller: “It’s like replacing Jimmy Stewart with Kaley Cuoco in a Hitchcock movie and watching what happens.”