In the opening shots of The Flight Attendant’s second season, we see protagonist Cassie Bowden (Kaley Cuoco) jogging along a boardwalk and saying hi to a chihuahua in a buggy, before introducing herself at an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting. It looks like a new, sober start for her. As one of the wildest and booziest characters in contemporary TV — in the very first episode, she woke up next to her dead one-night stand, with no recollection of the night before — Cassie appears to have finally got her life in order.
Well, sort of. She is still busily working as a flight attendant but has also picked up a gig at the CIA as a civilian asset, a job offer that emerged, somewhat improbably, at the end of season one after she tracked down her one-night stand’s assassin. While Cuoco’s character no longer has alcohol as an excuse for her behaviour, she still finds a way of creating drama, as the people around her keep pointing out. Her CIA handler has to remind her not to get too close to her marks. “I don’t get a lot on these people,” Cassie says. “I get a photo and a name, and I’m very curious. Isn’t that part of the job?”
“The first season was an ordinary person placed in an extraordinary situation,” says showrunner Steve Yockey. One of his inspirations for The Flight Attendant was Alfred Hitchcock’s 1956 version of The Man Who Knew Too Much, which embroiled Jimmy Stewart in a sequence of adventures. This time, however, “it was less ‘What sort of Hitchcockian-Jimmy Stewart adventure can we drop Cassie Bowden into?’” says Yockey. “It was more about ‘What is the emotional journey going to be?’ We immediately knew we wanted to deal with the realities of recovery.”
One of the show’s most innovative techniques is the way it uses scenes that take place within Cassie’s consciousness, known by the creative team as the “mind palace” scenes. In real time, it looks as though Cassie has zoned out, but really, she is stuck in her own imagination, always in the same room and in conversations with other people who are really just different versions of her own mind. In the first season, Cassie was in dialogue with her dead one-night stand as she was trying to figure out his murder; this season, she comes face to face with judgmental versions of herself.
As stunty as this is, there’s a deeper point. The show’s writers wanted to find a way of representing Cassie’s response to traumatic events; in real life, Yockey explains, “your brain will freeze a moment or situation and keep attacking it from different angles, trying to get you comforted or heal it.” In this way, over time, the traumatic incident will soften until you can finally deal with it. Cassie is wrestling with her own demons this season, on a journey towards self-acceptance, which is why her “mind palace” is literally full of herself. Yet it’s not a straightforward path to redemption: as in many TV shows, things need to get worse before they get better.
Creative approaches like this are partly what got Yockey the gig in the first place. Fresh from Cuoco’s success on The Big Bang Theory, where she played the attractive girl living across the hall from two socially awkward theoretical physicists, she acquired the rights to Chris Bohjalian’s 2018 novel before its release and got the green light from Warner Bros. What her production company needed was a showrunner to translate the book on to the screen.
Yockey, who was working on the fantasy series Supernatural at the time, remembers he brought up the “mind palace” idea several minutes into his pitch; Cuoco turned to Suzanne McCormack, senior vice-president of her production company, asking her if they could hire him. “I felt relatively sure I had job security,” Yockey says. “I pitched something wild because I thought I had nothing to lose.”
This season includes guest stars from comedy backgrounds. Mae Martin plays Grace, a fellow flight attendant who is oblivious to Cassie’s alcoholic past. Executive producer Sarah Schecter recommended Martin, being a huge fan of their Netflix show Feel Good, in which Martin plays a recovering addict whose life is absolutely not together. Grace, on the other hand lives in a spotlessly minimalist apartment and comes off more sinister than fun.
Another much-loved star is Margaret Cho, who Yockey says was the ideal choice for “a Korean black-market tuna impresario who lives in Iceland”. (Covid prevented the crew from filming in Japan so Cho was moved to Iceland.) In a secondary plotline, Cho’s character is in a pseudo-romantic relationship with Megan Briscoe (Rosie Perez), Cassie’s former colleague from the first season, who has been hiding out in Iceland from the North Koreans for a year after selling information to them.
The Warner Bros cover letter, which Yockey has framed and mounted on his office wall, asked for something that married Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment with Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s Fleabag. While Bohjalian’s book is serious in tone, even dark, the TV adaptation is lighter but with a distinct edge of danger. “I think Kaley was going out on a limb by choosing a very unusual take on the material and trusting me to deliver,” says Yockey. “The studio and network also went on that branch with her because it could have not worked.”
With titles such as Call My Agent!, Sex Education and Barry, dramedy has surged in popularity in recent years, but in The Flight Attendant, this feels like a necessary way to balance the bleaker elements of Cassie’s story. “You kind of have to [do that],” Yockey says. “Or else you’re watching ‘drunk woman suffers.’” And The Flight Attendant is so much more than that.
On Sky Max and Now from May 26