IN A SNAP: Kelli Garner stars as Kate, a Pan Am stewardess, in the new ABC drama. (Storms Media Group)
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Let’s dispense with the cheesy flying jokes right off the bat: The pilot episode for Sunday’s “Pan Am” really flies/soars/takes off. Whew. I feel better already.
Fully expecting yet another heaping helping of smelly 1960s cheese a la “The Playboy Club,” it’s a delight to find instead a super suds-er period piece.
In other words, it’s the kind of period soap that the Brits do so well — if the Brits had someone like Aaron Spelling as a producer, that is. The good news, too, is that this isn’t another “Mad Men” attempt.
Despite the time period (1963 — right about the same time period that “Mad” began), this drama about stewardesses (they were NOT called flight attendants back then) and pilots does exactly what “Playboy” cudda/shudda/wudda if it had decent writers and actors.
Opening at the once-glamorous and spectacular award-winning Pan Am terminal at JFK, we meet the principals in a very “Airport” kind of way — as they are arriving and getting what-for from the mean lady in charge of the “stews.”
Once you get past the 47,000 references to girdles (now known as Spanx, but let’s pretend it’s not the same), we learn fun stuff like how all the “girls” had to be under 32 years of age and unmarried. They had weigh-ins and hosiery inspections before each flight.
The stewardesses in question are the chief, Maggie (Christina Ricci”¨), who is smart and lives with a perpetual intellectual in the Village, and Laura (Margot Robbie), the beauty who inadvertently becomes the face of Pan Am on the cover of Life magazine on her first day as a stewardess. Kate (Kelli Garner) is Laura’s sister who is already flying well before Laura takes off.
Then, there’s my favorite, Frenchy Collette (Karine Vanasse).
Each girl has a very recent back-story and each one is juicier and (literally) more intriguing than the next. These stories are juxtaposed seamlessly — from a rescue mission to Cuba to fly out released prisoners from the Bay of Pigs, to incidents surrounding the Cold War to love gone wrong.
The pilots, Dean (Mike Vogel) and co-pilot Ted (Michael Mosley), are window dressing so far, (always wanted to say that about a male TV star!). But Vogel just doesn’t have the heft you’d want to see in a pilot of a giant aircraft back in the day.
The plots have me hooked already, and, so far, the “girls of Pan Am” are more than high-flying hookers — and kudos to ABC for making them actual women.
Best line of the night: “They are a different breed of women. They just had an impulse to take flight.”
So far, so great.