In a foreign country, our protagonist, played by Kaley Cuoco, discovers that the man she loved may not have been who she thought he was, and she then has to run from an international conspiracy as she tries to find answers. If this sounds familiar, it’s not because The Flight Attendant is back for a third season after its last episode aired back in 2022. Instead, Cuoco is starring in a new, completely separate four-episode limited series that does have a familiar premise but diverges considerably once it gets going, providing something different but not nearly as enthralling and satisfying.
Alice (Kaley Cuoco) is in love with Tom (Sam Claflin) and has just planted the idea of him moving with her to New Jersey and transforming their series of traveling meet-ups into something much more permanent. When Tom goes missing while they’re together on a train, Alice is desperate to find him, enlisting the help of multiple peoples whose true motivations she can’t know – a journalist (Karin Viard), a businessman (Matthias Schweighöfer), and an investigator (Simon Abkarian) – to help figure out what really happened and how to get him back.
The key differences between Vanished and The Flight Attendant are tone and ensemble. The latter was a dark comedy that emphasized Cuoco’s character as an unstable figure whose unpredictability was one of the show’s best assets, and she also had a network of friends on whom to rely on as she ran from accusations of her involvement in her mystery man’s murder. In this show, there’s no hint of humor, and she’s the one deliberately drawing attention to something that no one else has noticed, intent on finding a man who, as some speculate, may simply not want to be found. She’s creating trouble rather than running from it, but there’s plenty of it once she starts asking questions and refusing to be ignored.
Since her breakthrough role as Penny in The Big Bang Theory, Cuoco has been selective about her projects. The Flight Attendant was a high point that also earned her Emmy nominations, then she leaned more into dark comedy with Based on a True Story and has more recently anchored TV movies like Meet Cute and Role Play. She has a knack for comedy that blends well with drama, and unfortunately this role doesn’t offer her much in the way of crafting an entertaining personality, skewing more serious as someone who knows she’s not crazy and isn’t going to be gaslit into thinking that she’s imagining something she knows to be true. Expectations aren’t everything, and Cuoco is still a solid lead, but there’s nothing terribly memorable about this main character that allows her to enhance the role at all.
Four episodes doesn’t afford much time to explore the many intricacies of what Alice uncovers, but there isn’t necessarily more story left that could have filled additional hours. Brevity is a quality that few projects can successfully achieve, and this show does manage to fit in more than enough action and intrigue in under four hours. It’s not always all that exciting, but the fact that Alice is away from home but still competent enough to speak French and press on with her search for the truth should keep audiences enthralled enough for the duration of this show.
As a standalone series, Vanished is fine but unremarkable. As a reminder of how great and unique The Flight Attendant was, particularly in delivering an underrated second season that shouldn’t have worked nearly as well as it did given the show’s initial conception as a limited series, it’s hard not to compare this show with what could have been. Even having Alice be a bit more like Cassie might have made this show stand out more rather than, despite packing many twists and turns, feeling relatively expected.
Series grade: 5/10
