The series starts out on an intriguing note. Newly promoted Captain Dean (Mike Vogel) and second in command Ted (Michael Mosley) pilot passenger jets for the luxury airlines Pan America. The stewardesses under them, the primary focus of the series, are sisters Kate (Kelli Garner) and Laura (Margot Robbie), political trouble-maker Maggie (Christina Ricci), Collette (Karina Vanasse) and Bridget (Annabelle Wallis). Bridget is engaged to Dean but vanishes suddenly. Shortly afterwards Kate is approached by a government agent looking to enlist her as an international courier ferrying messages back and forth across borders, something Bridget was doing before her disappearance. These jobs soon escalate until Kate becomes a full fledged agent for the US government.
Meanwhile, Laura has fled from her own wedding, hiding from her domineering mother by getting a job working alongside her sister at Pan Am. She has always been the favored daughter but has never done anything for herself and seemed to live the charmed live, something that always angered her sister Kate. These feelings come to a boil causing Laura to move out of her sister’s apartment which allows the two to reconcile somewhat.
Maggie as a character is all over the place. She fights with her superiors over things like weight-ins (a practice that would never fly in today’s world) and being required to wear a girdle as part of her work uniform. She’s fiercely political but conflicted, willing to miss her flight to get a glimpse of JFK after his famous speech in Berlin but also getting romantically involved with a politician whose views represent all the things she’s staunchly against. She has a checkered past including getting her education under false pretenses and lying through a job interview to get her position at Pan Am.
The last of the girls is Collette. Collette is underserved throughout most of the series but when she is the focus it is amongst the most powerful dramatic moments of the whole show. She is originally from France and lived through the Second World War, something that affected her dramatically. Her emotional scars run deep and, when required to fly into Berlin during the infamous visit of JFK, she cannot bring herself to bury her feelings about the country that caused so much misery to her and her people. The strongest moment in the entire run of the series involves her singing the opening verse of Deutschlandlied to a room full of Berliners, a song tied to the Nazi regime. The raw emotion during this moment is palpable. Then Colette takes a back seat for more than half the series before finally getting another focus story. Her final story involving her lost family and the revelations of who she really is is poignant and tear inducing.
Despite being top billed, Christina Ricci’s Maggie is not the star of the show. Laura and Kate get the lion’s share of the plot points. Kate has major storylines involving espionage, spying and even murder. These missions are all tied into whatever country her flight is taking her on that episode including a memorable episode that takes them all to Moscow, Russia. The credibility of all this is stretched well beyond belief, however. Kelli Garner does a tremendous job selling the vulnerable as well as the strong woman underneath all that. It’s a performance that is just nuanced enough to overcome the unrealistic premise. By the time all this comes to a head in the final episode she is a far cry from the nervous and inexperienced courier and a full fledged spy.
Laura’s character arc on the other hand is underdeveloped. Perhaps a second season would have helped this out but with what we got it is underserved. She’s an emotional mess in episode one and that hasn’t really changed by the final episode. She runs away from her wedding in episode one and is still running away from relationships at the end. Her relationship with her mother is strained but is handled in shorthand, seemingly wrapped up by the second episode. Things are patched up abruptly and then never mentioned again for the remainder of the season. There’s still a token amount of clash between Laura and Kate but it’s only lightly peppered in throughout the series and never fully explored. Margot Robbie is good in this role and it’s no surprise she would go on to much better things but this is an underwritten character. She gets a lot of screen time but not a lot of it really matters.
Maggie is a bit of an enigma. We get glimpses into her past, glimpses that paint her out to be an unsympathetic character on the surface. Couple that with her non-conformist attitude about everything and she should come across as someone we root to fail. Yet there is more to her than that. She has a moral compass and political leanings that often clash with those around her. She tells a story about being on the election team for JFK, putting in so much time and effort that she won a meeting with the man only to miss out on it because she went to the bathroom at the wrong time. It’s a story so ludicrous that it just might be true, yet there’s no real proof that it is true. With Maggie you never know for sure. Later she’ll get involved with a pilot who’s smuggling goods to and from America. This story goes against everything we knew about her character and makes us really question her character. It also comes out of the blue, added into the final episode as if to tease us about what we may see in a second season that never materialized. It gives Ricci a lot of different things to work with as a character but it’s this sort of inconsistency that makes it hard to follow Maggie as a character.
With the women of Pan Am being the focal point, the men get a bit short changed. When they do get the focus it is mostly to their detriment. Dean gets his share of heroic moments but he’s also quick to cheat on his girlfriend when an old lover shows up out of the blue. Ted harbors anger over getting passed over for promotion by Dean leading the two to come to blows over it. Later he gets engaged to a woman who prefers the company of other women. Aside from their love lives most of what Ted and Dean do is just flying the plane here and there.
The series tackles some of the issues women in the workplace faced in the early 1960’s, primarily objectivity and sexual harassment. There are several scenes involving men of power groping the stewardesses and one case of a captain trying to position one of the girls in such a way as to allow him to look down her shirt openly. Early in the series a passenger attempts to force himself on Maggie only to find that she is more than willing to defend herself. When the passenger complains, rather than taking Maggie’s side, Dean, the pilot at the time, placates the passenger instead sending a clear message to the man that Maggie was the one in the wrong by denying him. It’s a sign of the times and is rightfully addressed in this show, yet these instances are brief and never get brought up again as if the writers dropped them in at the last moment. It missed out on really being able to make a statement about the good and the bad of society at the time.
As a series Pan Am started out strong but starts to unravel the further into the series it got. For a series this can be overlooked if it had a few more seasons to really find its voice. Had it been on a streaming service and not on network television that might have happened. That’s all in hindsight, though. With just the fourteen episodes to look at there’s just not enough to get behind to justify watching it all the way through. Certain characters get ignored for large swatches of the show and others don’t fully justify the screen time they do get. The men, especially Dean, come across as bland caricatures desperately needing to be fleshed out. On the positive side, at least the series didn’t end on a cliffhanger.
Release Date: September 25, 2011-February 19, 2012
Running Time: Roughly 43 minutes per episode
Rated TV-14
Starring: Christina Ricci, Margot Robbie, Kelli Garner, Karine Vanasse, Michael Mosley and Mike Vogel
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