SummaryFlight attendant Cassie (Kaley Cuoco) wakes up with a dead man next to her and no idea how she ended up in a different city than she remembered in this eight-part thriller based on Chris Bohjalian's novel of the same name.
SummaryFlight attendant Cassie (Kaley Cuoco) wakes up with a dead man next to her and no idea how she ended up in a different city than she remembered in this eight-part thriller based on Chris Bohjalian's novel of the same name.
[Cuoco] gives charm, wit and true confidence to a character who would otherwise be a hot mess we would neither care about nor believe in. It’s joyfully astonishing to see her spread her wings – and fly.
“The Flight Attendant,” like its heroine, reinvents itself in Season 2. The story is streamlined to focus more on Cassie’s own personal development. This might turn off those who enjoyed what Season 1 laid out, but if you’ve enjoyed the characters this far you’ll continue to love Cuoco and company as they try to become adults.
The whole production is buoyed by Cuoco’s performance, which is a pitch-perfect combination of high-energy franticness and real emotional insight. She rides along with the show’s occasionally bumpy tonal reversals, pulling off both its campy excesses and its sudden swerves into remembered childhood trauma.
Mostly she’s confronting past versions of herself who try to lure her back to drinking, but we also get surreal synchronized swimming sequences that are both gloriously goofy and disturbing. There’s a real-life meeting with her embittered mother (Sharon Stone), too, that’s hard to watch as parent and child put each other through agony. Some fairly static subplots involving Cassie’s bestie, Megan (Rosie Perez), and her lawyer pal, Annie (Zosia Mamet), pale in comparison to her own heightened internal struggles.
There are some seemingly unnecessary detours involving supporting characters like Cassie’s best friend Annie (Zosia Mamet) and co-worker Megan (Rosie Perez). But the main plot moves briskly, even as the investigation forces Cassie to turn inward and figure out how she became the ungainly disaster whose friends indulge her only because she’ll make good story fodder later. Cuoco is sharp and likable throughout.
There is more emotional violence and brutal sucker punches of honesty in the sixth episode of “The Flight Attendant” than entire seasons of other shows. ... I could almost forgive the inert storytelling of the five episodes before it. But I cannot, because it is an insult to Cuoco, especially, for the writing to relegate her to cartoonish ditzy bumbling blonde territory for five hours, and saving the raw devastation of Cassie’s interiority for its final moments.