Kaley Cuoco is responsible for making The Flight Attendant less dark. Though she is best known for her role as Penny on all 12 seasons of The Big Bang Theory, Kaley Cuoco recently turned heads with her performance in the comedy-drama series, in which she starred as the titular flight attendant, a reckless alcoholic named Cassie Bowden. Season 1 of the series premiered on HBO Max in November of 2020 and was quickly picked up for a second season the following month.
The critically acclaimed series follows Cuoco’s Cassie, a flight attendant and alcoholic who spends most of her time between flights partying with strangers, usually her own passengers. The show’s inciting incident occurs when she wakes up in a hotel room in Bangkok after a one-night stand with a passenger, Alex (Michiel Huisman), only to find him dead with no memory of what transpired. Cassie decides to clean up the crime scene and return to her duties as a flight attendant, which takes her to New York where she is accosted by the FBI. She then finds herself increasingly involved in this intricate murder mystery, suffering intermittent flashbacks to the night of the crime.
Though The Flight Attendant sounds like a dark and ominous whodunit, it actually features quite a lot of comedic elements as well, a major deviation from its source material, a 2018 novel of the same name by Chris Bohjalian. In a recent interview with GoldDerby on the heels of her multiple Emmy nods, Cuoco talked about the drastic shift in tone the series made during its transition from the page to the small screen:
The book is very dark and there’s not one ounce of comedy in the book. The book was great but I was like, we called it bringing Cuoco-isms to it because we’ve got to bring some ridiculousness to it and make it a little more cat-and-mouse and a little more fun.
This drastic shift in tone from the book to the show is evidenced by the fact that the series was categorized as a comedy by the Primetime Emmy Awards, instead of a drama. Cuoco ended up landing two Emmy nominations, one for Best Comedy Actress and a second nod in the Best Comedy Series category for her role as a producer. Considering the show’s additional 7 Emmy nominations, including one for Cuoco’s co-star Rosie Perez, it's safe to say the shift in tone absolutely paid off and much of it can be owed to the series' star herself.
The Flight Attendant will be back on HBO Max in the spring of 2022 and hopefully the second season is as full of mystery and intrigue as the first. Given that she optioned the book rights on her own, this series is clearly a passion project for Cuoco and the most defining role of her career next to Penny on The Big Bang Theory. The season 1 finale found Cassie completely exonerated for her apparent role in the murder, so it will be interesting to see where Cuoco wants to take the show next without any more source material to work with. So far, all signs point to season 2 of The Flight Attendant focusing on an entirely new adventure for Cassie.
Source: GoldDerby