Pan Am 2011-2012 - Pan Am
Série de TV
Estados Unidos - 42 minutos
Poster da série
Texto 1:
Pan Am is a television series centered around the iconic airline Pan American World Airways, the principal United States international air carrier from the late 1920s until its collapse on December 4, 1991, during the 1960s. The period drama, from writer Jack Orman (ER) and director Thomas Schlamme (The West Wing), will focus on the pilots and flight attendants working for the world-famous airline in the 1960s.
The series, produced by Sony Pictures Television, was picked up by ABC in May 2011 for the 2011–2012 television season. Sony licensed the rights to the Pan Am name and logo from Pan Am Systems, a New Hampshire-based railroad company that acquired the Pan Am brand in 1998.
The series debuted on September 25, 2011 and ended on February 19, 2012. The time slot was subsequently filled by midseason replacement GCB. On May 11, 2012, both series were canceled by ABC.
On December 20 2011 a Pan Am Soundtrack was released.
In May 2012, Sony Pictures Television had conversations with Amazon about picking up the series for a second season because of its international success. It won the "Best Series" at the Rose d'Or TV awards, Europe's equivalent of the Emmys. Unable to reach a deal with Amazon, the series officially ended on June 20, 2012.
Texto 2:
Younger siblings know how hard it is to live up to a gifted firstborn.
Any series that sets itself in the early 1960s is going to have to slink around the reflection of “Mad Men.” This season there are two: “The Playboy Club” and, beginning on Sunday, “Pan Am,” an ABC drama about stewardesses back when jet travel was glamorous, and so was serving drinks at 30,000 feet.
As a premise “Pan Am” sounds foolhardy, a knockoff that can’t possibly live up to the original, like a network trying to copy “The Sopranos” with a series about a ring of car thieves in Indianapolis.
The difference is that “Pan Am” romanticizes the past, whereas “Mad Men,” on AMC, takes pleasure in slyly mocking antiquated mores. Secretaries at Don Draper’s ad agency marvel at an electric typewriter, a mom at a pastoral family picnic tosses the trash onto pristine park grounds, a child who plays with a dry-cleaning bag is scolded, not for the risk, but for mussing the clothes inside. “Mad Men” evokes nostalgia for a careless, less restrictive way of life, floating on a permissive wash of sex, booze and cigarettes, but it never stops sending up the naïveté and backward biases of those times.
“Pan Am” takes place in New York, Paris and London, and practically every scene is shot in lush, golden light. The series is a paean to a more prosperous and confident era; even an airline terminal looks like a movie dream sequence about 1960s heaven.
“Mad Men,” which returns for a fifth season next year, is unquestionably a far better show, but “Pan Am,” like “The Playboy Club,” which began on NBC this week, may be a more accurate reflection of our own insecurities. When the present isn’t very promising, and the future seems tapered and uncertain, the past acquires an enviable luster.
“Mad Men” is veined with injustices: the way women are overlooked, blacks are ignored and Jews despised. “Pan Am” takes a more forgiving look at the 1960s. Nancy Hult Ganis, a former Pan Am stewardess, is an executive producer and appears to have looked back at her youthful escapades with a softening lens: a little like Helen Gurley Brown, who shocked people at the height of the Anita Hill sexual-harassment controversy with her fond memories of office panty pranks.
Some blatant forms of sexism are gently tweaked on “Pan Am” but with more affection than regret. Female flight attendants have mandatory weigh-ins and a matron slaps one employee on the fanny to make sure she is wearing a girdle. But the young women who submit do so with a smile; petty airline rules are a small price to pay for the newfound freedom to travel and seek adventure. A pilot, observing the crew’s laughter and confidence, admiringly tells another that these young women form “a new breed.”
Viewers may not see anything particularly fresh about this show’s foursome of stewardesses, however. The “Pan Am” heroines represent the dawning of the women’s movement, and they are not fully formed characters so much as stick figures borrowed from a Rona Jaffe novel.
Christina Ricci plays Maggie, a closet beatnik who wears the Pan Am uniform to see the world but at home listens to jazz and studies Marx and Hegel. Colette (Karine Vanasse) is French and carefree, until she discovers that her latest lover is a married man. Kate (Kelli Garner) is smart and ambitious, and she dreads being overshadowed by her pretty younger sister, Laura (Margot Robbie). Laura, a runaway bride who follows her sister into the airline business, is so gorgeous that Life magazine puts her picture on its cover article about the Clipper Age. “With a face like that you’ll find a husband in a couple of months,” a fellow stewardess tells her. But Laura and the others are looking for adventure and romance, not marriage.
ABC is the home of “Grey’s Anatomy,” “Desperate Housewives” and “The Bachelor,” so the emphasis on “Pan Am” is not traffic control or air safety. The show does try to broaden the story with a few cold war subplots: a Pan Am flight crew is assigned to help retrieve survivors of the Bay of Pigs disaster in Castro’s Cuba; British counterintelligence agents use airline employees to spy and pass secrets. Mostly, though, the espionage feels like padding, a way to assure viewers that they are not just watching early prototypes of Carrie Bradshaw and her posse — “Sex and the Cockpit.”
If only for the costumes and ’60s music, “Pan Am” is amusing to see at least once, but if it has any instructive benefit at all, it’s as a mood indicator for these times, not those. There have been plenty of series set in earlier times — “That ’70s Show” was set in the Carter administration, “M*A*S*H” took place during the Korean War. But usually period shows pick through the past to meditate on the present, whether it’s examining generational rites of passage or critiquing the Vietnam War at a safe remove.
“Pan Am” doesn’t say much of anything about the current state of the nation except that our best days are behind us.
Texto 3:
ABC’s Pan Am, along with its Charlie’s Angels and NBC’s woeful Playboy Club, seem to have been created to capture the nostalgia of AMC’s Mad Men (now a winner of the best drama Emmy four times in a row, which no doubt piques the copy-cat nature of the industry) while increasing the audience about ten-fold.
But Pan Am seems most intent on making the idea of the ‘60s and stewardesses and “the jet age” more glamorous than real. It has neither the exactitude of the times nor the talent of the writers to get at the issues, ala Mad Men, that illuminate the issues of the day. It only has the magazine ad dreams of the times – girls don’t have to be their mothers; they can also be modern women who get weighed at work and dumped at 32 for being too old.
Oh, and don’t get married because then Pan Am doesn’t want you either. Kind of a bummer if you think about it, but how cool is it that you get to fly to Europe and sleep with pilots?
If the writers of Pan Am really wanted to get at the issues that are festering under those issues, they should have at least tried. There’s certainly fodder at hand. We’ve come a long way, baby, but we’ve got a long way to go. We may have the freedom to not be our mothers anymore as the early 1960s begin to reshape the national consciousness, but – now this is a drag – so many of the men we meet haven’t got the memo yet.
But Pan Am is not interested in that kind of show – one that could mimic the nostalgia of Mad Men up to and including the part where progress is hard won and sexism will not be easily defeated. (We’ve watched Peggy from Mad Men take four seasons and lots of sacrifice to get where she is.)
Instead, Pan Am wants to revel in the cool blue stewardess outfits, the retro hipness of Pan Am itself and “the jet age” in particular, while giving viewers the romantic entanglements of said stewardesses with their male pilots and co-pilots.
The attempt, as it were, to add some gravitas to the fetishism of hip nostalgia (as opposed to going under the surface) comes in the form of one flight attendant asked to be a spy for the United States government.
To which the natural response should be, “Hmm, didn’t think you’d choose that option.” And then maybe some really loud laughing.
Pan Am focuses on pilot Dean Lowrey (Mike Vogel), who is super excited to fly planes and hop in and out of bed with his top stewardess, who he wants to marry because he’s a Good Guy and a Fly Boy. But she’s an international CIA spy, which he never figures out, so forget it.
Looking to salve his wounds, possibly, is Maggie Ryan (Christina Ricci), who’s a little boho, like Don Draper’s first girlfriend, and yet also particularly keen to be in the rarified air of the Pan Am stewardess. (Although you can’t look at Ricci without thinking, ‘What in the world are you doing in this?’).
Central to Pan Am is the plight of two sisters. Kate Cameron (Kelli Garner) is the oldest who busted out of the grip of their staid parents. And now she’s being recruited as an international CIA spy because Pan Am stewardesses have the perfect cover – they can fly all over the world without suspicion (except they’re outfitted in eye-grabbing blue). Anyway, you never get the sense from Garner’s performance that Kate pull off stealthy spy work. Not ever.
Her sister Lauren (Margot Robbie) is an aw-shucks type who runs away on her wedding day to be a stewardess like big sis, only she’s getting notoriety as a newbie because someone at Life took her picture for the cover on how cool the jet age is.
There’s also a French stewardess who has some affairs and mostly sexist co-pilot who wants to have affairs. He gets to utter these jaw-droppingly bad lines that are supposed to show the empowerment of stewardesses: “Look at that table over there,” he says, pointing to the Pan Am stewardess posse at a bar. “That’s natural selection at work, my friend. They don’t know that they are the new breed of women. They just had the impulse – to take flight.”
Wow.
See, that’s the problem with Pan Am trying to go retro. It’s glamorizing the stewardesses because they’re hot and they aren’t their mothers. They are flying off to Paris and England, sleeping with pilots and stuff. This is revisionist feminism of the strangest sort.
It’s less about independence than about natural selection and how awesome that is. It takes sexism and somehow makes it aspirational. And no scene reflects this more than the closing one, where four of the stewardesses are strutting in slow motion, all swivel-hipped and breezy as the cut a swath through the terminal and get set to board the plane, like models on a runway. Suddenly the camera looks back and focuses on a young girl of four or five, in awe of what she sees.
That’s what she wants to be when she grows up is the point.
And somewhere, both Peggy and Joan on Mad Men have a cry over progress.
