The new season speeds along with an entertaining, multifaceted caper plot that makes sense as a logical continuation. The intrigue into which she lands is the result of the cocktail of her coincidental Hitchcockian circumstance and her own self-destructive proclivities she hurls herself into her own investigation because she’s curious about what has happened, more than that she feels she must clear her own name. In Season 1, Cassie finds herself reckoning not only with a potential murder investigation, a global intelligence disaster, and a target on her back from an assassin, but also family issues and her longstanding dependency on alcohol. Season 2 launches this week, with a difficult task ahead of it: to re-ignite the entire story after it’s already made a comfortable descent, and to rev it to the velocity traveled by its previous trip. But it does-and was met with such fanfare that it was renewed for an unnecessary second season even after it reached its final destination.

The show tackles so much and jumps from multiple angles to others that it seems difficult to believe it might be able to maintain a safe cruising altitude. Season 1 of The Flight Attendant, HBO Max’s effervescent lite-espionage series that premiered in late 2020, was, despite pops of narrative turbulence here and there, rather surprising for the steadiness with which it sailed from its thrilling spy plot to its comical, postmodern commentary, to a thoughtful meditation on sobriety, and back again.īased on the novel by Chris Bohjalian, The Flight Attendant (which originally presented as an eight-episode miniseries) introduced us to Cassie (Kaley Cuoco), a hard-partying flight attendant who wakes up one morning in a Bangkok hotel room next to a (brutally stabbed) dead man she’s gone to bed with (Michiel Huisman), and thus finds herself caught up in what seems to be an international conspiracy. It’s even harder to do this in a way that feels at all novel or original.

Although a smooth final product might make it seem easy to pull off, it’s difficult to smartly blend genre hallmarks along with comic commentary-to create a text that qualifies as a certain kind of genre while also riffing on it.

Novel the flight attendant