The Flight Attendant review: Kaley Cuoco shakes Big Bang’s particles off her shoes in hugely entertaining new show

Pat Stacey

Kaley Cuoco is terrific as the titular character in new series The Flight Attendant, on which she’s also the producer

The Flight Attendant

March 18 2021 01:07 PM

WHEN an actor has spent more than a decade playing the same character in a phenomenally popular sitcom, it’s always going to be a challenge for them to outrun such a long shadow.

Just ask the cast of Friends. They’ve all been gainfully employed since the series ended in 2004, yet it’s unlikely they’ll ever again play characters as beloved as the ones that turned them into overnight stars.

Jennifer Aniston, currently starring in Apple’s The Morning Show, has enjoyed the most consistently successful post-Friends career of all, chalking up a string of popular movies. Someone somewhere, however, will always think of her as Rachel Green.

This is even more true of poor (figuratively speaking) Matthew Perry. Once predicted to have the kind of career Aniston has enjoyed, he’s bounced like a rubber ball from one project to another — Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, Mr. Sunshine, The Odd Couple — without any of them proving popular enough to last beyond a couple of years, let alone eclipse the memory of his Friends character Chandler Bing.

Kelsey Grammer hasn’t exactly been short of work offers since Frasier ended 17 years ago. Nonetheless, he’s decided to return to the character in a revival that has the potential to be a complete disaster.

On this side of the Atlantic, Richard Wilson, who was a busy, well-regarded character actor for decades before landing the role of Victor Meldrew in One Foot in the Grave, is destined to spend the rest of his days trying to ignore idiots shouting, ‘I don’t bloody BELIEVE it!’ at him from the other side of whichever street he happens to be walking along.

Kaley Cuoco, who played Penny in 12 seasons of The Big Bang Theory, which for much of its run was the most popular sitcom on the planet, is obviously keenly aware of the looming downside of being so closely associated with a long-running, massively successful series.

Do something well enough, for long enough, and there’s a danger people will think that’s all you can do.

In an interview with Radio Times magazine this week, Cuoco says she doesn’t think anyone would have hired her to play the lead in The Flight Attendant, if she hadn’t produced the series herself.

Cuoco snapped up the rights to Chris Bohjalian’s novel and co-produced it through her own production company. Apparently, Reece Witherspoon was also interested in acquiring the book.

No disrespect to the fantastic Witherspoon, but I’m glad Cuoco beat her to the punch. If she’s looking to shake the Big Bang’s particles off her shoes, she couldn’t have chosen a better way to do it.

Cuoco is fantastic as Cassie, the titular flight attendant whose job tending to the needs of first-class flyers means frequent stays in exotic locations.

This, in turn, means frequent one-night stands (not to mention the occasional stand-up in the plane’s toilet) with male passengers and frequent brain-hammering hangovers the morning after.

Cassie might work on planes, but her life is more like a train wreck on a loop. She’s more than a flighty (sorry) party girl; she’s a blackout alcoholic who wakes up beside men she can’t even remember meeting.

On one stopover in Bangkok, she wakes up in a luxury hotel room to find her latest lover, hunky passenger Alex Sokolov (Michiel Huisman), dead, his throat slashed open and his blood soaking the bed.

Barely able to remember anything from the night before, Cassie hastily cleans up the crime scene and slips out of the hotel to join her cabin crew-mates for the flight back to New York. By the time they touch down in the Big Apple, news of Sokolov’s gruesome murder is all over the news and the FBI are all over Cassie.

The first episode of The Flight Attendant just flies by (sorry again!). It’s a glossy, pulpy, propulsive mystery, peppered with black humour.

It’s full of little surprises, too, such as the moments when Cassie retreats into a sort of mind palace, where she recovers bits and pieces of information about what happened the night before, but also finds herself confronting the loneliness behind her drinking and some memories from her past. Hugely entertaining.