Since getting HBO Max, I’ve been trying to burn through series like it’s my job. I’m also trying to stay on the up and up with what’s popular right now, and especially if that something is a mystery series. But first I wanted to revisit an older miniseries that was quite popular itself when it first came out. Let’s see what I thought about Mrs. Fletcher and The Flight Attendant!
Mrs. Fletcher was a 2017 comedy miniseries about a mom with a new “empty nest” and a new view on her sexuality. Mrs. Fletcher is Eve: a divorced single mother of a college-aged son who is the director of a nursing home. Even though she runs into some struggles at work, it is clear she loves what she does. I think she loves being a mom to son, Brendan, too, but he’s too busy being a horny teenaged boy to notice. He’s also going to college which means he’s going to ignore her even more (and he does). Eve knows she’s got to fill her spare time with something so she decides to take a creative writing class at the local college.
It’s a very small group of students with a hip and fun teacher, so naturally they all get close with one another. I loved the dynamic between this group more than anything! While Brendan is struggling to assimilate into college life, Eve is thriving in her new life, suddenly discovering porn and her sexuality. She’s also starting to get close with Brendan’s former classmate (and kid he bullied), Julian, who is also in Eve’s creative writing class. The two get close, but Eve always ends it before it even begins. By the end of the series though, her co-worker Amanda initiates something that is sort of wild! Even crazier, is Brendan makes a surprise visit home and walks in on it! Gah! I’m sure you can imagine.
The Flight Attendant was vastly different from Mrs. Fletcher. Cassie is a flight attendant who travels the world and constantly gets drunk and hooks up with people. It’s her thing. And that’s all fine and well until she wakes up beside a dead guy in Bangkok. Cassie was so drunk that she has no recollection of the night but is pretty positive that she wouldn’t have slit a guy’s throat. In panic mode, she cleans the hotel room and returns to her next flight like life is fine and dandy. Obviously it doesn’t take long for Alex Sokolov to be found, and her co-workers want to know all about it since they assume that she hooked up with the handsome passenger.
Once they land back in New York, Cassie is spiraling, and looks to her lawyer friend, Annie, for help. I give credit to Annie for being an awesome friend because Cassie, although clearly damaged, doesn’t seem worth covering for. The FBI is also basically right on top of her. One agent thinks it’s clear she’s behind the murder, while the other has her doubts. The rest of the series we see Cassie try to clear her name while not getting murdered (she does end up befriending an assassin), but also come to terms with her alcoholism that it tied to a past trauma.
The finale episode was pretty cool, but it could not make up for the rest of the series for me. The storyline was sort of boring, and the way things cut between what was currently happening and her delusions featuring Alex and her past trauma were so jarring that it was hard to watch or even know what was happening right away. Maybe if I’d seen Kaley Cuoco in other things I would find her more endearing in this, but she wasn’t really that great. Cassie was totally unlikeable, and while I applaud the writers for not making a squeaky clean female lead, there were just too many other factors that I didn’t care for that made the overall series not work for me. That being said, this was smartly billed as a limited series, because it almost immediately got picked up for a second season. Even though there are plenty of cliffhangers to expand upon, I cannot picture a world where is a second run is going to be good. I think I’ll leave it at one and done for me.
One and done is what Mrs. Fletcher was, though, and for that I am happy. Although I think they could have easily transitioned in what would surely be an awkward second season if they felt like it. To me, Mrs. Fletcher was far superior because of the general simplicity of the plot, and the fact that Kathryn Hahn is so damn likeable! Seeing her as a lead makes me happy inside, and I hope she continues to do so. I felt this story was much more engaging, and I liked that even though it was Eve’ story, time was still taken to really give the peripheral characters some meat to their plotlines. If you’re looking for quality television, I would recommend Mrs. Fletcher for your viewing pleasure (see what I did there?).