'Fly Girls,' lots
of baloney, way up high
New CW series about the lives of flight attendants
By Tom Conroy
Mar 23, 2010
It can be enjoyable to have a conversation with someone who is talking baloney (to put it politely) if you know that he is talking baloney and he knows that you know.
The CW’s “Fly Girls,” a reality show about flight attendants that tries to put across a bizarrely anachronistic fantasy view of their lives, is almost pure baloney, and it’s briefly interesting to see how far the producers are willing to push the silliness. But since the show fails to bring anything new to the usual reality mix of bickering, bad dates and forced workplace intrigue, viewers will quickly grow bored.
Premiering Wednesday at 9 p.m., “Fly Girls” pretends we’re all back in those pre-deregulation days when the airlines were glamorous places to work that paid high salaries and had good working conditions — and could still hire and fire flight attendants based on their looks and gender.
All five of the show’s flight attendants, who work for Virgin America, are young and attractive women. Discussing their job, they say things like “When we put on our uniforms, the world is our playground.”
Farrah, a statuesque blonde, blames her inability to settle down on what she refers to unironically as her “jet-set lifestyle.” We get a taste of that lifestyle when Mandy complains about a passenger who wanted to spit his gum into her hand.
The women say they are part of Virgin’s “promo team,” so maybe they get extra pay and actually can afford their fancy “crash pad” in Marina del Rey, Calif. As promo-team members, part of their duties is attending company events. The first big intra-fly-girl clash occurs when perky Mandy (real name Mandalay) and sneaky Nikole both try to get the “coveted position” of riding on a firetruck next to Sir Richard Branson, the company’s founder, at the opening of a new destination.
At another promotional event, Tasha, a single mother and probably the most levelheaded of the five, is told that she absolutely, positively has to get Sir Richard’s speech to the podium because it’s really, really important. Most of us would simply put the speech on the podium, and maybe that’s why we aren’t on reality shows. Tasha, of course, carries it off to a busy room where it would be easy to misplace it.
The contrived drama is built right into the women’s living conditions. In the premiere (one of two episodes the network made available for review), Nikole moves in with the other four, even though she and Mandy, who used to be friends, are feuding.
“Sometimes I seem to have bad luck with girls,” Nikole says in voice-over. In the best reality-show-villain tradition, she proceeds to annoy, insult or undermine the other ones, all the while protesting her innocence.
At least “Fly Girls” succeeds visually. The video is high quality, and the five stars seem to have been selected so that viewers can tell them apart easily, which is not always the case on reality TV.
In the premiere, Louise, who has just ended a serious relationship, finds an “IFB,” or “in-flight boyfriend,” who asks her to come to a cocktail party. He winds up acting like a total jerk. Later, the girls talk about getting hit on by losers because of “the flight-attendant fantasy.” More likely, the IFB is an actor desperately trying to realize his fantasy of making an impression on TV.
In the second episode, apropos of nothing, Mandy flies to New York to see if she can be more than friends with a cute wanna-be rock star she knows.
Years ago, getting a glimpse into a real stewardess’s personal life would have been novel and exciting. But after a decade of nonstop reality programming — and three decades of decline in the air-travel industry and the lives of those who work in it — it just seems trivial and sad.
“Fly Girls” is unlikely to take off.
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