TV Review: I had high hopes for The Flight Attendant

— It's like a romcom crossed with The Texas Chainsaw Massacre

Kaley Cuoco in The Flight Attendant

I had high hopes for The Flight Attendant (Sky One, 9pm March 19 and Now TV). It wasn’t that the premise was promising — flight attendant wakes up in bed with a corpse after big night out in Bangkok (we’ve all been there). But then a show about an advertising agency in 1960s New York didn’t offer much, until we saw that they could do with it in Mad Men.

I was encouraged by the 98% rating that The Flight Attendant earned on Rotten Tomatoes. That, and to a lesser extent, imdb.com are the two places I’d check before plunging in for a new show. So we sat down to enjoy a certain hit in our place. Five minutes later we were doom-scrolling Covid news stories. They were still funnier than The Flight Attendant.

I didn’t do my research. The show is produced by, and stars, Kaley Cuoco, who wakes up in bed with the corpse. She’s best known for her role in The Big Bang Theory. There are two kinds of people in the world — people who find The Big Bang Theory funny and people like me. It must be an age thing. I sat through an episode of it once and started to worry about the future of civilisation.

Anyway, The Flight Attendant has a similar feel to it. Whip-smart dialogue that doesn’t sound like anything anyone would ever actually say in the real world. For something that promotes itself as full of twists and turns, there is a casual disregard for the plot. In fact, it should have been called Why Didn’t She Just Call the Cops?

She wakes up next to the corpse in the hotel room. It looks like his throat had been cut with a broken vodka bottle. Ok, there had been a lot of booze with this guy the night before, but no inkling that she had anything to do with his demise. Anyone else would ring the cops.

Instead, she decides to ring her friend the lawyer, played by Zosia Mamet, who was brilliant in Girls. The lawyer warns her that the legal system in Thailand is ‘Byzantine’, which is American for ‘other countries are very backward’, even if the Byzantines were fairly advanced. Anyway, Kaley Cuoco's character reckoned that was a good enough reason to do a runner and things got a bit anxious after that, but I don’t care.

The problem with The Flight Attendant was tone. On the one hand, you had zippy, clever dialogue and try-hard montage-shots to make it feel like you were watching something stylish like Ocean’s 11. On the other hand, you had a grisly murder. It felt like a romcom crossed with The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.

The sad thing for me is that this will probably be a huge hit. It’s sad because it means I’m out of touch because I can’t get into this ‘it’s a mood’ dark comedy that gets 98% on Rotten Tomatoes. I think it’s time for a new TV rating app for people like me — if you’re looking for a name I’d suggest Old Farts.