It's 1963. The jet age has dawned, and we're going around the world with the crew of a Pan Am Clipper. That crew is made up of a captain searching for his gone-missing stewardess girlfriend, his co-pilot who appears to be Pan Am's version of Pete Campbell, and four stewardesses. Two are sisters, one the black sheep of the family, the other the golden child who bolted from her own wedding and wound up on the cover of Life magazine after joining Pan Am. One is a burgeoning feminist/free thinker, as we're shown by her living in the Village and having some guy at her apartment using Marx as an excuse to not answer the phone. The fourth is a Frenchwoman who was apparently sleeping with a married man, which she learned when he brought his family on a flight.
Oh, and did I mention that the black sheep has been recruited by the CIA at the suggestion of the stew who went missing?
Ridiculous espionage subplots aside, there is a certain charm to this show. The sisters have a troubled relationship, but they're secure enough with each other to be honest and have each other's backs when their manipulative mom shows up on a flight. The captain, as much as he's trying to project the alpha male characteristics expected of someone in his position in 1963, is clearly hurting, and his dedication to find his girlfriend is a welcome vulnerability.
The other characters, well, I'm not so sure where they're going. They may be a little to tightly defined as horndog/bohemian/French, and it'd be nice to see them get some range.
As for the show's ability to capture Mad Men's vibe, well, no. They try very hard, certainly with the costumes and music, but try too hard by inserting incidental dialog that sounds like a forced attempt to remind us that it's 1963. The writers do not have Mad Men's ability to come up with dialog that sounds like it would be spoken by people in the 1960s but not sounding like they're trying to prove that it's the 1960s.
Still, this is a pleasant enough show, and the airline setting does allow for a broad range of locales and potential plots. I don't know how much of a chance we'll have to explore the world with this crew, though, as the show's ratings are dismal, thanks in no small part to the anemic numbers put up by Desperate Housewives, whose last season is, almost unbelievably, stupider than any of the previous seasons. I also don't see a good time for them to move the show to without possibly making the show weaker, ratings-wise.
So while this experiment in ripping off basic cable is going better than The Playboy Club, I wouldn't actually call it a success. It's likeable enough, but it doesn't keep me from hoping that March 2012 would just get here already.
No comments:
Post a Comment