The Flight Attendant got off the ground running in 2020, taking viewers on a wild ride that featured thrills, jokes, and everything you’d expect from a comedy-drama about a flight attendant caught up in a murder.
The renewal for The Flight Attendant Season 2 came as a huge surprise, primarily because of the self-contained nature of The Flight Attendant Season 1.
Fast-forward almost two years, and The Flight Attendant Season 2 is almost ready for take-off.
Six episodes were screened for critics in advance of the premiere, and while I can’t deny there are more twists than before, they water it down to the point that the narrative feels muddled instead of compelling.
When we pick up with Cassie, she’s moonlighting as a CIA agent while still working as a flight attendant, which in theory, should raise the stakes considerably.
Unfortunately, the plot moves in many bizarre directions that make it extremely difficult to connect with our heroine.
Suspending disbelief for a show of this caliber is par for the course, but Cassie’s plot goes from beat to beat without taking much of a breather, making it even more challenging to understand our lead’s machinations.
Kaley Cuoco returns in a blaze of glory, taking on the roles of different iterations of Cassie. It’s a lofty task, but Cuoco is on the top of her game here.
The Mind Palace was a key component of cracking the case on The Flight Attendant Season 1, but here, it comes across as a more contrived gimmick that doesn’t belong in this story.
The series suffers from an identity crisis because it can’t decide whether it wants to be a comedy-drama, a full-fledged comedy, or even a thriller.
The CIA element doesn’t work as well as it should, either. A flight attendant moonlighting as a CIA agent is believable because both professions allow for a wealth of travel.
But the action also has to be believable to pull off such a swing in the storytelling department. Maybe the show would have been better keeping Cassie as a flight attendant full-time.
Allowing the character to be caught up in another mystery without the CIA element would have probably flowed much better.
Zosia Mamet and Deniz Akdeniz return as Annie and Max, and they’re working with the best material.
The evolution of those characters feels like an organic progression from where we left them on The Flight Attendant Season 1.
New additions to the cast include Callie Hernandez and Joseph Julian Soria as a perilous couple who are involved in the big mystery of the season.
Mae Martin, Margaret Cho, and Mo McRae get some great material that I won’t delve into because I want to avoid spoilers.
While the series has some good moments on its second outing, it raises several questions about the long-term viability and whether it was a good idea to order a new season after such a stellar first outing.
Some shows are only designed to have a short shelf-life, and The Flight Attendant worked much better as an eight-episode limited series.
The Flight Attendant Season 2 premieres Thursday, April 21, with two episodes.
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Paul Dailly is the Associate Editor for TV Fanatic. Follow him on Twitter.