Pan Am takes flight

From Pan Am's pilot ep. - Maggie (Christina Ricci) and Laura (Margot Robbie). (ABC)

It’s impossible to talk about the wave of retro television this season without mentioning the ABC series Pan Am. The pilot episode debuted to good ratings, but opinions are mixed about the show’s quality. I found that Pan Am has a lot of awkward dialogue and unnatural conversations. The first scene, featuring a Pan Am flight preparing for take-off, takes entirely too long to reach a conclusion, capping in at 12 minutes. And yet, I think Pan Am is doing a much better job of showcasing the historical period of social change than The Playboy Club is. Unlike The Playboy Club, Pan Am doesn’t credit the stewardesses with revolutionizing the place of women in the workplace, but simply recognizes them as one part of a bigger whole. Of course, this doesn’t stop the show from glorifying them. The iconic last shot of the pilot episode features the backs of the four main female characters, wearing their stewardess attire and waving, as a little girl flashes them a reverent smile. The Pan Am stewardesses represented a combination of the traditional perfect woman, and a new, glamorous ideal: the career woman.

At MSNBC.com’s Overhead Bin, former real-life Pan Am flight attendants tell their stories and critique the show’s mostly accurate depiction of the airline. Helen Davey, who worked as a Pan Am stewardess from 1965 to 1986, tells Overhead Bin, “…we all thought we had lucked into the best job in the world.” Within the show itself, a male pilot even states that the women of Pan Am were ahead of their time: "They don't know they're a new breed of woman. They just had an impulse to take flight." But if the Pan Am stewardesses were the prototypes of the ‘modern woman,’ they were members of an elite club – a very tightly controlled one. As reflected on the show, the women of Pan Am had to be 5’2, single, skinny, and were regularly checked to make sure their girdles were on properly. And, of course, only white women were able to step into the revered position. Thus, like The Playboy Club, the ticket to liberation for women was a pretty face.

But what stood out to me most is that I found the female characters to be so much more endearing than the leads in The Playboy Club. I really liked Laura, the newest stewardess who ran away from a marriage her mother was pushing her into (although, what’s with the ‘new girl’ in both this show and The Playboy Club being blonde? Is it supposed to add to their naïve ‘everygirl’ appeal?). Laura’s sister, Kate, is also a stewardess, and is using her position to work with the CIA. I really hope the series explores the relationship between the sisters, because Kate is the person who helped Laura decide not to get married and to live for herself. Despite this, their relationship is already being tested by Laura choosing to become a Pan Am stewardess, putting Kate’s secret mission in jeopardy. I also found Colette, a fellow stewardess with a funny French accent who has an affair with a married man, to be a very sympathetic character. And as an ensemble cast, the women of Pan Am are convincingly interesting. At the very least, Pan Am makes a fairer case for the women of the 1960s than The Playboy Club does: they were controlled, objectified and trivialized, but they were also learning how to take their destinies into their own very capable hands.