Kaley Cuoco as Cassie, who must exhume her own trauma as she tries to solve a murder.
The Flight Attendant
Developed by Steve Yockey
Based on the novel by Chris Bohjalian ’82
HBO Max
I’ve been watching Kaley Cuoco on TV for over two decades, but I don’t think I truly saw her until this year. The 35-year-old actress broke out in the early 2000s starring as a (ditzy) boy-crazy teen on the John Ritter sitcom 8 Simple Rules. Later, she made a lifetime fortune playing a (ditzy) blonde bombshell orbited by scientist dweebs on the megahit comedy The Big Bang Theory. But with HBO Max’s riveting comic thriller The Flight Attendant, Cuoco is no longer overshadowed by brasher, broader male co-stars. Her Cassie Bowden may be a jet-setting, binge-drinking, bed-hopping party girl—but she’s no ditz.
Based on the novel of the same name by Chris Bohjalian ’82, which Cuoco herself optioned after founding her own production company, The Flight Attendant emerges like the on-screen equivalent of an escapist beach-read. Vixen lead? Check. Globe-trotting adventures? Check. White-knuckle mystery? Check. Yet the show’s emotional depths are as deceptive as its twisty plotting. What starts out as sexy and splashy (international flings! electropop soundtrack!) soon transforms into a quasi-hallucinatory nightmare over eight episodes, as Cassie must exhume her longstanding trauma to clinch who killed her one-night stand in Bangkok. The Flight Attendant scrutinizes the lives of several ethically compromised women without ever sacrificing its sense of winking fun.
Bohjalian, bestselling author of over 20 novels, is no stranger to Hollywood or celebrity fandom. Oprah Winfrey selected his 1997 legal saga Midwives for her famous book club and the story was later adapted as an awards-nominated Lifetime film starring Sissy Spacek. The TV network also aired Secrets of Eden in 2012, a John Stamos-led suspense film based on Bohjalian’s 2010 novel of the same name. His 2020 mystery novel The Red Lotus, which covers a tourist’s disappearance in Vietnam, has already been optioned for television. Like The Flight Attendant, it centers an amateur sleuth who uses her unrelated professional skills to solve a whodunit tangled in a political spider’s web.
Cassie is stewarding a half-day flight to Thailand when she meets dapper Alex (Michiel Huisman), a businessman in first-class. They spar over Russian literature and soon he invites her out for a date that ends up at his hotel room. They glug drink after drink. The next morning, after blacking out from a night of indulgences, she discovers Alex next to her in bed covered in blood, his throat slashed.
Cuoco herself optioned Bohjalian’s book, which centers on an amateur sleuth.”
With only hazy memories from the previous evening, none of which include homicide, Cassie spirals into panic and absconds back to the United States. Federal agents soon catch up to her, and Cassie, consumed with guilt and fear, finds herself inhabiting two worlds: The corporeal one, where she must pretend everything is normal while secretly investigating Alex’s crooked dealings, and her PTSD-induced mind palace, where she convenes with a mental projection of the murder victim. Disoriented Cassie darts between the real world and her psychoscape, treating Alex’s “ghost” as a confidante while trying to learn everything she can about an enigmatic woman named Miranda (the ever-witchy Michelle Gomez). But as more flashes from the night in question flood back into her consciousness, so do long-suppressed childhood recollections. In addition to puzzling out who was behind Alex’s death, Cassie would also like to know why her loved ones keep calling her an alcoholic.
Cuoco is dynamic in the role, playing an aging hedonist who has no idea how her neediness and self-involvement alienate her from others, including her gentle older brother (T.R. Knight), envious colleague (Rosie Perez) and fed-up best friend (Zosia Mamet). Someone as bitterly self-sabotaging as Cassie could potentially poison viewers, but Cuoco’s inherent nimbleness and warmth cushion us from the full destructiveness of the character’s psychological denial.
Protean in his approach to subject matter, Bohjalian has made a 30-plus-year career of hopping between popular genres. With each new story, he plunges readers into seemingly disparate but no less equally heart-racing topics that dig at the core of the human condition—from medical crimes and ghost stories to the Armenian Genocide and World War II. Even while consistently exploring the consequences of tragedy, Bohjalian never stops reminding us that things aren’t always as they seem.