FALL TV EXTRAVAGANZA!!!

 

PAN AM

*** (out of ****)

Success breeds failure. It might be a rule of life, but who cares. It is a rule of pop culture, and that’s what matters. And it’s a rule for one reason: people want success so badly and so quickly, that they will do whatever it takes, or copy whatever they need to, in order to have their success now. It almost always fails, and not just because cheap and easy is rarely good. In the instance of Mad Men, and its the two shows it begat this season, Pan Am and The Playboy Club, it’s a matter of tone.

 

Much had been made before the season about the two shows that take place in the sixties, just like Mad Men. A show like Mad Men is great for big networks, because it’s on a small network, and the smaller networks can be used by the bigger networks like the major leagues use their minor league systems. If the show gets canceled before its time, networks will swoop in and hire everyone for their projects, from actors to writers to show runners. But if the show is like Mad Men, and doesn’t get canceled even though the ratings are low, the networks have no choice but to steal the ideas, instead of the people responsible. Mad Men is an even better example than most because it drips with tone. Fans of the show could easily pick a Mad Men scene out of a lineup, something that would be very hard to do for fans of CSI or NCIS or other shows filled with random letters. Mad Men‘s tone is unmistakable, and, for the sake of argument, this is the tone of Matthew Weiner’s creation.

 

Mad Men is not successful because it takes place in the sixties, though the network’s would argue that it’s all the show has to offer. Network executives are stupid, however, and so now we have two new shows that takes place in the sixties. Matthew Weiner doesn’t work on either of the shows, so all we know before we watch them is that they don’t have his tone. The Playboy Club is much too short-sighted and too stupid of a show to realize any of this. They made a show that was as close to Mad Men as possible, assuming that the tone would just come with the Xerox. But much like a copy of copy of a copy denigrates with every repetition, nothing good, except for a slick suit or so, made it from Mad Men to the The Playboy Club. I’m not saying that Pan Am would exist if it wasn’t for Mad Men. It probably wouldn’t. But Pan Am beat The Playboy Club within the first five minutes, because if Pan Am was greenlit because of Mad Men, the comparisons immediately stop there. Pan Am establishes its tone right away, and whether you will enjoy the tone or not, you will have to admit it’s its own.

 

Pan Am is the story of four stewardesses, back when being a stewardess meant something, and the term “flight attendant” was just a twinkle in the eye of America’s consciousness. There’s the tough one, the French one, the new one, and the cool one. The whole episode takes place over one flight, the maiden voyage of a Pan Am plane. It’s not a bottle episode, because throughout the episode, we get to know the four girls through flashbacks. The French one runs into a passenger she had an affair with, so we flashback to that. And so on and so on. The flashbacks are so up and down, and most of the time absurd, you almost can’t wait to see where the time machines of their brains take you next. They include the crew in Cuba during the Bay of Pigs invasion, trying to get their plane off the ground, and one of the stewardesses, the tough one, being asked by the British government to become a spy for their country. What in the fuck!?! All of this going down during a show that is breezy and chalk full of smiles.

 

Which leads us to this so-called tone. As I said before, no one could confuse this show with Mad Men, and that’s to Pan Am’s great credit. Instead, Pan Am is shot like a movie from its time, as if Rock Hudson and Doris Day are sitting in first class, but with today’s equipment and camera tricks. This mixture reminded me more of Spielberg’s Catch Me if You Can than anything Mad Men has ever done. From the colors to the music, Pan Am attempts to end the argument that today even holds a candle to back then. It’s fun. Mad Men is great, but it’s rarely fun. If The Playboy Club is just Mad Man for Dummies, Pan Am is Mad Men for People Who Can’t Yet Go to the Depths of the Darkness in Humans that Mad Men Will Take You. But don’t make the mistake of deciding to watch this based on how you feel about Mad Men. Pan Am has some work to do, like not trying so hard to have their characters Forrest Gump their way through the sixties, but if it gets there, there’s plenty of room in TV town for both Pan Am and Mad Men. Let the comparisons end now.

 

UP NEXT: HART OF DIXIE!!!

 

-Ryan Haley