The flight attendant: a clumsy escaped caper

There was a moment halfway through the fourth episode of The stewardess, a new aloud thriller on HBO Max, when I realized I had zero idea of ​​what was going on. Not only that, I realized that while I had generally thought I was following the plot, I had actually lost sight of at least one full episode earlier. I had been there for an hour, happily with the semi-surreal twists and surprises of the series, with little to no hints that I had completely failed to keep up with what was a seemingly important new development in the story. Did it matter? Not really. Was I still happy to keep watching? I was!

The stewardess stars Kaley Cuoco as Cassie, the titular flight attendant, who enjoys her life as a literally and metaphorically baseless person in her group of friends and family. She’s a bit distracted, she runs late, she likes to party and keep things light, and she has a seriously unexamined drinking problem. It suits her to live a life where she can train with a sexy first-class passenger, spend a night with him in an exotic location, and then likely never see him again. Fairly quickly in the pilot, however, Cassie’s unattached setup crumbles. She sleeps with a handsome man she met on her flight (Michiel Huisman), gets drunk with him in Bangkok, then wakes up the next morning to find herself in bed with her horribly bloody corpse.

Cassie then makes a series of decisions ranging from “Wow, that’s bad enough” to “You’ve had I’m kidding me, ”the kind of decisions that quickly get her out of the hotel room but inevitably turn into disasters later. And then, predictably and comfortingly, it all snowballs exactly as you’d expect. Cassie is associated with a murder she didn’t commit and she’s in a troubled world. His friends and colleagues are also trained in it and everything is escalating at a rapid and gloriously rapid pace. The stewardess is edited with sneaky and cunning split screens, which make it feel like a murder mystery through Pillow talk, or maybe a funny Soderberghian heist. It’s strange to call a thriller madness, but it’s about there The stewardess lands, and I certainly didn’t mind.

The whole production is supported by Cuoco’s performance, which is the perfect combination of energetic frenzy and genuine emotional insight. It accompanies the sometimes bumpy tonal inversions of the series, succeeding both in its campy excess and its sudden drifts in a recalled childhood trauma.

Part of Cuoco’s challenge is that The stewardess forces Cassie to occasionally experience pauses in reality, times when her brain turns to the hotel room. She has long and sometimes frustrated conversations with the deceased, who becomes an embodiment of her own memory, but also an imaginary friend who tries to help her solve her murder. (You could probably add a surrealist Bryan Fuller-esque take on the afterlife to the list of The stewardessinfluences.) Cuoco navigates these interludes with surprising skill. They force her to keep the show’s energy going, to keep its comedy feel light, but also to record Cassie’s legitimate fear of losing her grip on what’s real and what isn’t. It’s impressive how well it works.

Most of the supporting characters are more one-dimensional, although they are also tastefully done. Rosie Perez is lovely as Cassie’s flight attendant best friend, a delight that continues even though in episode four she was at the center of the subplot of the plot that I had completely failed to capture. Zosia Mamet plays Cassie’s friend and lawyer, in a performance that seems out of step with all the mania surrounding her, yet adds a pleasantly sardonic note to the chorus of the flying weirdness. Even Michiel Huisman, as the still-talking death, has a nice chemistry with Cuoco’s bouncy frenzy.

So even though by episode four I had almost no idea what anything had to do with anything else, the feel of it was working anyway. There’s a clear, strong grip on the dramatic escalation, though the mechanics of this one hardly seemed worth appreciating. What I am less clear about, but I will be very interested to see more, is what will follow. (HBO Max releases the first three episodes of Thanksgiving, with the rest of the season’s eight episodes taking place each week after that.) The fourth episode was the last one provided to critics, and although that was enough to get me invested in the series, it was also enough to make me curious how The stewardess plans to deal with the fallout that Cassie is clearly headed for.

Cassie has a serious drinking problem, and that’s to the credit of the show The stewardess don’t ignore what could easily have been a disturbing but under-explored subtext. With each episode, it incorporates more and more of the stuff that Cassie was desperately trying to put aside, and it seems clear that this part of how The stewardess will return all this error is for Cassie to have a major account with herself. I want this to happen, but I’m very nervous about this accident. A lot of what’s nice about the first few episodes is the show’s ridiculous act, and hopefully he finds a way to navigate Cassie’s eventual epiphany without sacrificing the show’s silly, over-the-top feel. .

From what I’ve seen, however, The stewardess fulfills a need for escape television that will strike many in this gloomy holiday season. What says “Thanksgiving 2020 entertainment” better than a show about international air travel, snazzy jinks, and important self-examination, but also Kaley Cuoco panicking while flirting with a hot death?