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Gratitude might be the word of the day, but can we talk for a moment about his underrated cousin at the dinner table? Satisfaction is what we hunger for on this vacation, not just in terms of what we take in through our mouths, but through our eyes as well. Devouring a good show with a side of pie certainly helps the occasion hold the landing.
“The Flight Attendant,” a new streaming series starring Kaley Cuoco in her first major live-action role after “The Big Bang Theory,” achieves that kind of digestible fullness, the kind we get from a show. lively, agile and substantial. , which achieves an ideal balance between danger and lightness. Few shows can legitimately claim to find this mix of good times, great anxiety, and intense pain while faithfully refraining from taking themselves too seriously.
Playwright Steve Yockey deserves to be recognized as the architect of this sentiment, as he was the one who adapted Chris Bohjalian’s bestselling series in 2018. Mostly, really, it’s Cuoco’s show fully and completely – her fully possessed rendition of an undoing party girl is the main propulsion of the mystery. More than that, it proves that her lineup goes way beyond what we’ve seen of her in the many sitcoms that have defined her career so far, with “Big Bang” being just the most recent to date. ‘a chain that goes back to her child actor. days. (She also voices the lead character of the excellent “Harley Quinn,” which, again, is a conscious choice to take a hammer at preconceived notions about her image.)
Cuoco’s “Flight Attendant” character, Cassie Bowden, and “Big Bang” Penny are one genre, yes. But Cassie’s Shadows let audiences know from the start that her good times character is a front. At the start of the story, we relish Cassie’s gift to sniff out the best bars, parties, and clubs in each destination. She is also far too good at holding her vodka.
Despite her flaws, Cuoco also gives us a woman we could just idealize, one with style and a sexual confidence that wows everyone around her. She is obviously a wreck, but one which shows admirable bravery.
So, when Cassie flirts with a mysterious stranger in first class, getting her card and name – Alex Sokolov (Michiel Huisman) – it’s anything but a fatality among her colleagues that the couple will hook up. Even here, however, she does so with intellectual flair: she castigates him over his choice to read “Crime and Punishment” on an international flight, characterizing herself as some sort of “Doctor Zhivago” girl. Maybe she read it. Maybe she just knows that’s the right answer to upload it. Whatever the truth, he bites, telling her that he finds “Zhivago” messy.
“What’s wrong with the mess?” she purrs in response, and the circles begin.
Their drunken whirlwind night-time rendezvous in Bangkok passes like a dream; a more honest reading of the situation would call it a wasted glamorous drunkard. Dress him as you like, but in the imprecise morning that follows, Cassie wakes up next to Alex’s bloody corpse with no memory of what happened.
From there, the alluring antics subside as the thriller kicks in. The meandering energy launched and sustained by Susanna Fogel’s directing in the first two episodes keeps “The Flight Attendant” pacing as Cassie goes by. from one problem to the next, each of its own making and getting worse with each ill-advised move it takes. If the scripts weren’t so smart and Cuoco wasn’t so sure to sell Cassie’s mess, we’d be screaming and moaning onscreen.
Encouraging her feels good instead.
This character contains an expanse of internal conversations and conflict, and while this initially plays out as a clever way to stage her efforts to piece together all the details she can squeeze out of her drunken intoxication, it transforms. quickly into something more abandoned. Thus, the recklessness of Cassie’s stupid moves that endanger her is deserved without ever diminishing the sharp intelligence of her performance.
To level her chaos, Rosie Perez and Zosia Mamet play Cassie’s co-worker, Megan Briscoe, and best friend Annie Mouradian, who, luckily for Cassie, is also a shark-like lawyer. The straightforward personality Mamet attributes to Annie is a clear counterweight to Cuoco’s mania and far more effective as an oppositional weight than TR Knight’s Davey, long-suffering brother Cassie. (In all fairness, in the four episodes provided to critics, Knight has a lot less screen time.) Perez, on the other hand, is difficult to fix, which makes things interesting. It’s also unclear what to do with her relatively deaf presence at first, although she has a lot more complexity to work with as the series progresses. Soon she is also having fun playing in the dark.
All of this lends a dashing appeal to “The Flight Attendant” while inviting the audience to contemplate what drives a woman to the edge. The main character’s guidance system consists entirely of compulsive behavior, regardless of its degree of self-harm. Cassie’s uncontrollable urge to get to the bottom of this mystery to save her own skin is matched only in the ferocity of her alcohol abuse, and the two are a way to struggle, unsuccessfully, with shock. massive that shakes a darkness older than it was healing. with alcohol, leakage and risk.
Viewers who are not used to watching Cuoco combine darkness and plummeting comedy will experience something new from him in “The Flight Attendant”, and whether it is a second season or that it stays true to its eight-episode limited-series designation, it’s firm proof that it’s capable of more than just traveling light.
The first three episodes of “The Flight Attendant” premiere Thursday, November 26 on HBO Max.
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