Come Fly With Me

I finally got around to seeing "Pan Am," the new ABC series ripping off "Mad Men" with its ironically nostalgic look back on the early 1960s, and I hope "Mad Men" producer Matthew Weiner loves being ripped off.  Because "Pan Am" is a pretty good ripoff.  (I think now I'm being ironic.) 

As noted, "Pan Am" involves a group of stewardesses and a couple of cocky pilots working for the now-defunct airline of that name, and how in the early sixties - 1963, to be precise - a stewardess position was one of the very few ways women could make a career for themselves and those who did become stewardesses made the most and the best of it.  This show pretty much depicts their female protagonists in a sympathetic light.  (One stewardess character is even a CIA operative, to take advantage of the Cold War mentality of the time.) And star Christina Ricci, as purser Maggie Ryan, doesn't come across as a movie star denigrating herself by appearing on the small screen; she's as dignified here on American television as Judi Dench was in playing a sitcom role (Jean in "As Time Goes By") on British television. 

Sadly, none of this pre-feminist subtext is likely to matter to viewers. As with "Mad Men," which causes viwers to be nostalgic without irony by showing twentysomethings occupying career-oriented entry-level jobs in the 1960s (while twentysomethings occupy Wall Street today), "Pan Am" will likely cause viewers to pine for those earlier times, before airline deregulation in 1978.  Like, wow - airline travel used to be elegant and refined? Coach class seats were comfortable?  Blankets were available on overnight trips?  Stewardesses actually paid attention to you - and served you edible meals? Passengers could actually enter the cockpit? And, when you boarded a plane, you didn't have to take off your shoes?? Sadly, 9/11 changed a lot of that, as well as deregulation, but at least today women can be pilots.  They can't be navigators, though - the three-man crew shown in "Pan Am" is also a thing of the past, the navigator's job rendered obsolete by computers in the same way that Pan Am itself was rendered obsolete by competition and mergers. 

As a series, "Pan Am" is likely to be the best historical drama you'll see on broadcast television, though NBC's "Parenthood," set in the present, is still the best drama on broadcast TV overall.  (Not that it matters to a network - NBC - having entered its eighth season in last place.)