The new mystery from the folk behind You and Booksmart finally arrives in Ireland this week.
It has been a long time since we’ve seen a show that we immediately knew we were going to have A LOT of fun watching, but that is pretty much exactly what happened during the first few minutes of The Flight Attendant.
Kaley Cuoco began shaking off the shackles of sitcom land thanks to her stellar voice-work on the recent Harley Quinn animated series (which you should definitely seek out, ASAP), and those shackles are snapped in half thanks to her turn here as the titular flight attendant, Cassie.
She loves to drink, she loves to party, she loves to rock up to work juuuuust in time, and seems to view her job almost as nothing more than an excuse to hit up the swankiest nightclubs around the world. During one of her long-haul flights, she flirts with one of the business-class customers, Alex (Game Of Thrones’ Michael Huisman), and they meet up in Bangkok after they’ve landed.
They have a lovely time in some of the more beautiful parts of the city, she goes back with him to his lush hotel room, gets blackout drunk, and wakes up covered in blood, as Alex’s throat has been slit open. A quick call to her lawyer friend Annie (Girls’ Zosia Mamet) confirms her worst fears about Bangkok prisons, so Cassie quickly cleans up as much evidence that she was ever there as she can, and makes a run for it back to the airport.
From there, episode on episode, The Flight Attendant plays out like a pulpy, trashy, airport-bought novel come to life. As the net closes in around Cassie, she begins to investigate further into Alex’s life (and ultimate death), taking her (and us) down avenues completely unexpected. And just like any great trashy novel, each episode ends with a “You can’t end it THERE!” cliffhanger, forcing you to consume the next episode immediately.
Executive produced by Greg Berlanti (the mind behind hit thriller You), with some episodes directed by Susanna Fogel (co-writer of hit comedy Booksmart), the melding of those two worlds results in a fantastically propulsive, often darkly hilarious story, fleshed out and filled in with some magnificently memorable supporting characters. However, the lynchpin for the whole thing is Cuoco herself.
Her performance as Cassie is intensely layered, with the character managing to be incredibly likeable and winning, but also deeply troubled and self-sabotaging. Throughout the show, she regresses into her own imagination, playing out conversations with Alex (or at least her internalised version of Alex), continuing to slowly fall in love with a man who has already died. Her real-life interactions with friends and family are equal parts hilarious and heartbreaking, feeling heightened or all-too-real, depending on what the scene calls for.
And the show itself mirrors that, often dipping into stylish split-screen in order to get the story told faster, feeling like a life lived on fast forward, almost as if it is trying to keep up Cassie as she actively distances herself from yet another trauma.
It results in an ultimate example of a necessary binge-watch, being both massively entertaining and regularly thought- and conversation-provoking.
All eight episodes of The Flight Attendant land on NOW on Friday, 19 March.
Clip via HBO
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