I never understood the appeal of The Flight Attendant, and I still don’t.
Well, at first I thought I did. I thought we all tuned in to HBO Max’s dark comedy thriller in 2020 because it was fun trash, and everyone deserves that in doses. I did not understand it in any way exemplifying top-tier television writing, direction, or performance, but nine Emmy nominations and a host of other accolades disagree (on Blake Neely’s win for title music, we agree).
If The Flight Attendant wasn’t your cup of chilled ginger ale at 30,000 feet in Season 1, not much is going to change in its second outing from creator and showrunner Steve Yockey. The first season isn’t actually required viewing; Season 2 offers a hard reset with Cassie almost one-year sober, living in LA, and dating someone vague and wonderful. “Things are pretty great,” she says so naively at an AA meeting that another attendee calls her bluff — and even viewers will wonder if this is a front.
But it’s not. She genuinely believes — at least for a few minutes of the premiere — that things are good and normal. That won’t last if you remember the most insane twist of the Season 1 finale, which was that the constantly visibly vexed Cassie is now a civilian asset for the CIA, putting her unique resume of “woke up next to a dead man she didn’t murder” to use in the only way that makes sense. A quick recap from her handler confirms that Cassie is not, in fact, the ideal stealth operative, that she has repeatedly gotten over-involved in assignments and still balks mightily at the mildest surprise.
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Cuoco dusts off this frenzied, one-note performance, though she does get to push its limits in the recurring narrative device that has Cassie imprisoned in her own mind. In Season 1, this had her returning to the scene of the murder and falling in love with a mental projection of the victim (healthy!); in Season 2, it doubles, triples, and quadruples the number of Cassies on-screen as she confronts various unrealized versions of herself — some of which will never come to be. Party Cassie wears the sequinned gold dress from the night of the murder and talks like the kid you shouldn’t listen to in a peer pressure PSA (she regularly encourages Cassie to drink and not “be boring”), while a polished version of her in a new flight attendant uniform shows magical, mature possibilities.
Credit: HBO Max
The rest of the cast does their level best with the material, but the disconnect in The Flight Attendant is that almost no one acts like an actual person, especially the new characters. From new flight attendant Grace (Mae Martin) to AA attendee Jenny (Jessie Ennis) to Megan’s new friend Utada (Margaret Cho) to Cassie’s new boyfriend Marco (Santiago Cabrera), everyone is a suspect in a spy thriller. Yet none of these suspicious newbies reveal ulterior motives or even benign ones in the first six episodes sent to critics, while continuing to act completely abnormal.
Zosia Mamet is still the de facto voice of reason as Cassie’s best friend Annie, even if she’s facing deep-rooted emotional issues this season that show no immediate sign of resolution. Cabrera finds a lot of dimension with few scenes, but Marco is forged from the purest styrofoam, often absent for long stretches that have us (and Cassie) forgetting he exists and isn’t a fake boyfriend she made up from Canada. Michelle Gomez nearly saves the whole season but is tragically only in one episode, knocking joke after joke out of the park and leaving you wondering whether she’s the only person who understands the tone of this show or the only one who doesn’t.
If The Flight Attendant is getting its priorities across, the show only works if you accept that Cassie Bowden is the single most important being (and only blond) on the planet. Multiple people are after her, someone out there is deliberately framing her, and she constantly finds herself in the wrong place for legal absolution but the right place to fuel rampant main character syndrome. Her alcoholism and recovery are clumsily handled between the Cassie-clone gimmick, an unwieldy mother-daughter backstory, and multiple characters who clock her erratic behavior but either enable or antagonize her out of what appears to be pure malice.
The first two episodes of The Flight Attendant Season 2 are now streaming on HBO Max, with two new episodes on April 28 and one new episode weekly until May 26.
