Stream It Or Skip It: ‘The Flight Attendant’ On HBO Max, Where Kaley Cuoco Tries To Solve A Murder She May Have Committed

Kaley Cuoco spent twelve years as the underrated glue that kept The Big Bang Theory from being a complete farce. Her portrayal of Penny was more than just the “dippy hottie across the hall”; she had her own smarts, she judged Leonard, Sheldon, Raj and Howard as people instead of caricatures, and displayed more warmth than Penny had any right to have. Still, she was still overshadowed by her co-starts, mainly because what she brought wasn’t as broad. Now, in The Flight Attendant, her first major live-action role since BBT ended (though she’s funny as hell in Harley Quinn), we get to see the full range of what Cuoco can do.

THE FLIGHT ATTENDANT: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: We see a plane touch down, and then a split screen of a passport being stamped and a flight attendant confidently striding through an airport terminal.

The Gist: That flight attendant is Cassie Bowden (Kaley Cuoco), who has been just about everywhere during her career on flight crews, and she’s partied everywhere, too. As we see her striding, we also see scenes of her drinking at various bars and sleeping with mostly anonymous guys.

On a flight to Bangkok, she encounters a good looking guy in 3C, who she learns later is Alex Sokolov (Michiel Huisman). They flirt, she tells him the book he’s reading, Crime and Punishment, is a super bore, they even make out in the lavatory (ick!). Her colleague and friend Megan Briscoe (Rosie Perez) gently reminds Cassie how unprofessional it is, and Cassie thinks she won’t follow through on seeing Alex in Bangkok, but soon calls him.

They have a great night together, including free-flowing alcohol. She wakes up the next morning, sees blood on her hand, and then sees Alex’s dead body in bed, with his throat slashed and his body covered in blood. Cassie panics and cleans things up before bolting the hotel, with only very patchy memories of what happened the night before. The only call she makes is to her friend Annie Mouradian (Zosia Mamet), a mob lawyer, and asks her an odd question about the Amanda Knox case.

Cassie flies on to Seoul in an understandable panic, but tries to hide what happened from everybody, though she implies to Megan that she spent the night with “3C”. An anonymous call leads to Alex’s body being discovered, and as the news starts to circulate, Cassie self-medicates with vodka. But she’s also haunted by visions of dead rabbits from her childhood, and she suddenly finds herself back in that room in Bangkok, talking to Alex, who for some reason is still alive in her head. Oh, and another complication: Her brother Davey (T.R. Knight) keeps calling to make arrangements for his family’s trip to New York to visit her.

As the FBI gets involved, agents Kim Hammond (Merle Dandridge) and Van White (Nolan Gerald Funk) start to question the flight crew when they get back to JFK airport. Shane Evans (Griffin Matthews), a fellow flight attendant, is a bit gossipy, and Cassie’s frenemy Jada (Yasha Jackson) tries to stay above the fray. But Megan tells the agents that Cassie may have been with Alex that night. For her part, Alex tries to bolt the airport, but she gets cut off. During her questioning, she flashes again to the room, and Alex tells her that they were with his colleague Miranda (Michelle Gomez) that night.

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? Because of the show’s twists and turns, and its psychological thriller aspects, The Flight Attendant reminds us a lot of its fellow HBO Max series Search Party.

Our Take: HBO Max sent four of the eight episodes of The Flight Attendant to critics, and I Hoovered up all four of them in one sitting. Given the nature of what I do, that’s rare, but the show was just that engaging on a number of levels. Based on a novel by Chris Bohjalian and adapted by Steve Yockey (Cuoco and Greg Berlanti are among the executive producers), The Flight Attendant manages to be tense and funny, stylish without being distracting, and is able to tell it’s multi-layered story with very few logical hiccups.

That last part is an achievement because we’re not only with Cassie trying to unravel this mystery in the present day, but we’re going into her head, with the flashes back to the dead rabbits and her alcoholic father and the fact that she’s building a relationship with a dead man, one that’s helping her remember details of the night. There are a few hiccups along the way, as the attempts to get to know Megan and Annie feel like detours instead of a deepening of those characters, but for the most part, the story moves along and makes sense, leaving us with plausible cliffhangers at the end of each episode.

In the middle of it all is Cuoco, and she puts in an Emmy-worthy performance. Cassie definitely drinks to forget, and as we see her brain playing tricks on her, Cuoco manages to express the shock and dismay that Cassie suffers after she wakes up next to Alex’s bloodied body. We knew that Cuoco had this in her, even as she played Penny for 12 years on The Big Bang Theory, but she deftly carries Cassie’s complicated emotions throughout the four episodes we saw. Even as we get into her relationship with her brother, she’s able to stand toe to toe with Knight in scenes where he tries to tell her how much worse it was for him than it was for her growing up.

Cuoco is supported by a great cast, led by Knight and the always-capable Perez, who plays someone who looks up to her younger colleague, mainly because Cassie lives the life Megan wishes she had. But we see Mamet, Dandridge and Matthews all have their moments during the first four episodes. And, in a much more complex lead role than you might expect, Huisman manages to give Alex more dimension than just a guy that Cassie slept with.

Sex and Skin: We see Cassie sleep with Alex, but she’s either under the covers or wearing a bra (being an EP gives Cuoco the ability to say no to nudity).

Parting Shot: As she hears about Miranda for the first time, Cassie looks out the window of the hotel room in her head and sees her sitting down with the agents. She asks, “Who was that woman?”

Sleeper Star: Zosia Mamet’s Annie is completely in control of things, making herself a stark contrast to Cassie. Given some of the flighty roles Mamet has played in the past, it’s refreshing to see her playing a person who is in control and in charge.

Most Pilot-y Line: Nothing we can see.

Our Call: STREAM IT. The Flight Attendant is a tense mystery whose score and stylistic flourishes help add to the tension. Kaley Cucoco’s lead performance is one of the best ones we’ve seen this year, and she leads a fine cast.

Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.

Stream The Flight Attendant On HBO Max