Premiere of "Pan Am" Review: lighter than air, but no bubble headed?
David Caruso in need of his trademark sunglasses to look at the bright sky and see the CSI: Miami, a new Sunday night competition: sleek aircraft Pan Am, a new series, that is, to use words that were used during the period in which the show established, kicky - fun, with the promise of something greater.

The West Wing, director and executive producer of Pan Am, Thomas Schlamme directed dreamy vision of what it would be a flight attendant about the early 1960s, and its smooth visual storytelling has done a lot to cover awkward dialogue and trite plot twists, such as passenger boarding the flight marriage containing naughty stewardess (audacious Karine Vanasse) he had an affair with. Kate (Kelly Garner) helps with some of the CIA's espionage, even as the Bay of Pigs mess dragged in to lend some heavy gravity of a series that really wants to be lighter than air.

The most interesting of the main roles Christina Ricci, playing a rebellious flight attendant with a working knowledge of Marxism (you can practically see her beatnik black turtleneck under her uniform to put out, and Ricci wide dark eyes offered evenings spent reading a protest firing bongo poetry). In general, Pan Am juggles romance, espionage, and the comedy in the story lines that will take some time to sort out. Right now, the show does not seem to know exactly what she wants to be, and to experiment with tone, and seeing what works and what does not. That is the attitude that if the tinkering is done properly, can lead to an interesting series.

Pan Am - along with the Playboy Club, which has already landed with a loud flop in the ratings - suggest a profound yet almost inexplicable jealousy that broadcast networks of Matthew Weiner's Mad Men. Period drama persistent appeal for network programmers, even though it does not really work for them, ratings-wise, for a long time (the rate of Swingtown, rear, American Dreams), and that if Pan was to get only the size of Mad Men ABC ratings He would quickly make a death spiral in the cancellation.

Shaw can certainly do without the dialogue, which tries to formulate what she wants us to believe this - that if the flight attendant career led to, as one of the pilots horny says without a trace of credibility, "a new breed of woman they ... only that the impulse to flee. "Pooh-Leese. What Pan Am sells a fantasy, or envious reminder of what life was once like up, up and away - yes, kids, there really was once a spacious and friendly service. (But then again, you were dressed in suits and ties or dresses to fly, rather than pants and shirts with patches of Starbucks on them.) I'm intrigued enough to look again to see how the show adjusts how much of the romantic story of a spy against it will be located on.