For 12 years, Kaley Cuoco pretty much exclusively played Penny on The Big Bang Theory, so her career is mostly a blank slate following the end of that massively popular sitcom. First with her work as the voice of the uninhibited title character on Harley Quinn and now with her lead role in the HBO Max miniseries The Flight Attendant, Cuoco is clearly looking to prove herself in more mature roles while retaining the bubbly likability that helped her connect with audiences as Penny.
In The Flight Attendant, Cuoco plays Cassie Bowden, a hard-drinking, hard-partying flight attendant for the fictional Imperial Atlantic airline, a job that allows her to travel all over the world, drinking and dancing and picking up men in various cities. She seems content with her hedonistic lifestyle, although there’s an undercurrent of sadness to her heavy drinking even at the start of the series. Her life unravels following a night of romance in Bangkok with Alex Sokolov (Michiel Huisman), a passenger she meets on the flight from New York City and instantly connects with. Cassie wakes up the next morning after getting blackout drunk to discover Alex’s bloody corpse lying next to her, his throat slit.
She panics and flees the scene after attempting to clean things up, and nearly everything Cassie does in the four episodes available for review (out of eight total) makes her look more suspicious. She flies from Bangkok to Seoul and then back to New York, but it doesn’t take long for Bangkok police to discover Alex’s body, so by the time she lands in New York, Cassie is already on the FBI’s radar as a potential murder suspect.
Against the advice of her lawyer best friend Annie (Zosia Mamet), Cassie launches her own investigation into Alex’s death, attempting to reconstruct her memories of the night they spent together. She also has a bit of a mental breakdown, talking to her own imagined projection of Alex as she works through her theories. That gives Huisman the chance to stay on as a regular presence, although the romantic developments between the two characters are odd given this Alex is just a figment of Cassie’s imagination.
As infuriating as some of Cassie’s behavior can be, Cuoco keeps her likable, with the right balance of charm and self-destructiveness. It’s not hard to see how she can rope people into helping her, even against their better judgment. Mamet nearly outshines Cuoco as the pragmatic, dedicated Annie, whose day job seems to involve defending lots of unsavory underworld figures. The more the show reveals about her, the more it feels like she might have made for a more intriguing protagonist, although she provides a strong counterpoint to Cassie’s impulsiveness.
A subplot about Cassie’s flight attendant colleague Megan (Rosie Perez) getting involved in some shady dealings is less successful and often feels like part of a separate show, although it might eventually fit in as the season progresses. Likewise, some personal drama between the two FBI agents on Alex’s case comes off as superfluous. Creator Steve Yockey, working from the 2018 novel by Chris Bohjalian, mostly provides a strong supporting cast, including some of Cassie’s other co-workers, her family-man brother Davey (T.R. Knight) and various sinister figures in Alex’s life, so that Cuoco doesn’t have to carry the show on her own. Whenever Cassie gets too caught up in her own internal drama, other characters show up to remind her (and the audience) there’s a world outside her head.
Yockey (a former Supernatural writer and producer) keeps the pacing lively, with relatively short episodes around 45 minutes each, and he delivers enticing cliffhangers that are likely to keep viewers bingeing from episode to episode. Despite the life-or-death stakes, the tone is mostly light, with a jaunty, jazzy score and some sardonic humor. In addition to her mental conversations with the late Alex, Cassie also flashes back to moments from her childhood, which was obviously darker than she would like to remember, as Yockey slowly introduces more troubling elements to Cassie’s sunny personality.
Still, The Flight Attendant never takes itself as seriously as so many prestige-TV murder mysteries do, which makes it potentially forgettable but also easier to watch. This isn’t a show that requires a lot of heavy reflection after each episode. It moves quickly from one plot point to the next, led by Cuoco’s buoyant presence. Director Susanna Fogel sets the tone in the first two episodes, with glossy shots of glamorous locales and frequent split screens to break up the action. The color palette is bright and varied, a strong contrast to the typical muted grays and blues of many prestige mystery dramas.
There’s a chance that the plot will fall apart in the second half of the series and come to a dissatisfying end, and Yockey and the other writers have thrown in a lot of potential red herrings and dead ends. But The Flight Attendant is breezy and engaging enough to watch until its conclusion, just to see how Cassie gets herself out of her latest self-created mess.
Starring Kaley Cuoco, Michiel Huisman, Zosia Mamet, Rosie Perez, T.R. Knight, Michelle Gomez, Colin Woodell, Merle Dandridge, Griffin Matthews and Nolan Gerard Funk, the first three episodes of The Flight Attendant premiere Thursday, Nov. 26 on HBO Max, with subsequent episodes premiering each Thursday.