Pan Am (TV series)

Did You Know?

• The September 12, 2011, edition of TV Guide's Fall Preview issue included an upside-down advertisement on the back featuring the four stewardess characters for a fictional cover using the magazine's 1960s logo.
• Between December 20, 2011, and January 5, 2012, the first nine episodes were made available free of charge on Internet download sites in the United States to boost viewer interest.
• The complete-series DVD was released on January 29, 2013, by Sony Pictures Home Entertainment, and re-released by Mill Creek Entertainment on August 13, 2019.

Cast and characters

Christina Ricci portrays Margaret "Maggie" Ryan, the idealistic and liberal-minded purser who often challenges Pan Am's rules. A college dropout from Tacoma, Washington, she previously worked as a waitress and gained her Pan Am job by pretending to be fluent in Portuguese. Margot Robbie plays Laura Cameron, a newly trained stewardess who appears on the cover of Life magazine in her uniform, creating tension with her older sister Kate. Laura ran away from her own wedding in New Haven, Connecticut, and struggles to become independent.

Robbie briefly reprised the role in Quentin Tarantino's Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, serving a cocktail on a Pan Am flight. Michael Mosley is Ted Vanderway, the first officer and a former United States Naval Aviator and test pilot who was honorably discharged after a crash blamed on him, though his father later admitted a mechanical fault. Engaged to his childhood friend Amanda, Ted slowly develops a relationship with Laura. Karine Vanasse plays Colette Valois, a French stewardess orphaned during the German occupation of France in World War II.

Her parents were French Jews killed at Dachau, and she later learns she has a brother who was placed for adoption, whom she plans to search for. Mike Vogel portrays Dean Lowrey, a Boeing 707 captain recently promoted to one of the youngest airline captains. A former Air Force pilot, he had a past romance with the crew's former purser Bridget and pursues a relationship with Colette, while also secretly involved with Ginny, the mistress of a Pan Am vice president.

Production

Sony licensed the Pan Am name and logo from Pan Am Systems, a New Hampshire–based railroad company that acquired the brand in 1998. Nancy Hult Ganis, a former Pan Am stewardess from 1968 to 1976, served as executive producer and series developer, conducting research at the Pan Am Historical Foundation and the University of Miami archives. She advised actors, props, production designers, and costumers for accuracy. The show featured the trademark sky-blue Pan Am uniforms, with costume design by Anne Crabtree.

Twenty craftsmen produced each outfit using the same techniques as the 1960s, and girdles were mandatory for the stewardesses, which some cast members found extremely restricting. Male costumes were inspired by James Dean and Steve McQueen. Filming took place at the Brooklyn Navy Yard and other New York City locations, with the pilot partly filmed at Gold Coast Studios in Bethpage on Long Island. A life-size recreation of a Pan Am 707 jet was kept in a hangar near the Brooklyn waterfront.

The pilot episode cost an estimated $10 million. The series was produced by Sony Pictures Television and optioned by ABC in May 2011. ABC commissioned five more scripts in November 2011 and later added a fourteenth episode. Steven Maeda was hired mid-season as showrunner to serialize and embrace the soap aspect of the show.

In November 2011, media speculated about cancellation after a comment from Karine Vanasse, but the network denied it. The series was canceled on May 11, 2012.

Broadcast

In Canada, Pan Am aired on CTV the same night as ABC broadcasts but in different time slots by region, and also on CTV's sister cable channel Bravo! on Saturdays. The series premiered in Brazil and Panama on Sony Entertainment Television on March 18, 2012, and in Costa Rica on Teletica on October 15, 2012. In Ireland, it premiered on RTÉ Two on October 17. The United Kingdom premiere was on BBC Two on November 16, 2011; the BBC suspended the broadcast after eight episodes, with further episodes returning on January 28, 2012.

Canal+ began broadcasting in Spain on October 29, 2011. Sweden's TV3 premiered it on October 16, 2011. Portugal's SIC aired it from November 6, 2011. The Netherlands' NET 5 premiered it on December 26, 2011.

Australia's Nine Network broadcast it in 2012. In Belgium, Vijf aired it in the Flemish region from February 15, 2012, and BeTV in the French region from May 7, 2012. Finland's Yle TV2 premiered it in January 2012. Denmark aired it on TV3, TV3 Puls, and TV3+.

Catalonia's TV3 started broadcasting on February 10, 2013. In South East Asia, beTV aired it from February 4, 2012, every Saturday at 9:00 p.m. STAR World India began airing it from February 11, 2012. Saturdays before moving to a later time slot after episode 9 due to lower viewing numbers.

Reception

The show received a 67 out of 100 on Metacritic based on 28 reviews, indicating generally favorable reception. Heather Hogan of AfterEllen praised the show for pushing women to the forefront of every story, though she noted it did not yet know what kind of show it wanted to be, but found value in its variations as a Cold War drama, nostalgic soap opera, and feminist dram. Later episodes received lower reviews for losing focus on the women and adding romantic storylines.

Matthew Gilbert of The Boston Globe gave the show a B grade, calling it the better network 1960s drama compared to The Playboy Club, with addictive romance and stylized innocence, but criticizing the espionage plot as absurd and the female empowerment message as feeble. The Insider included Pan Am in its list of 10 Best New Fall TV Shows. Media coverage noted that no major characters smoke, despite the practice being common on flights and in terminals in the 1960s; ABC and its parent Disney banned tobacco use by the show's stars.

Thomas Schlamme called this anachronism the one revisionist cheat, having encountered a similar restriction on a previous ABC show. In the UK, Melissa Whitworth of The Daily Telegraph said the series airbrushed the sixties with a romanticised view. Colin Kennedy and Sharon Lougher of the Metro called it irritatingly in love with its own style but a soapy guilty pleasure. Euan Ferguson of The Guardian praised Ricci's casting but criticized the overall casting for making characters hard to distinguish.

Emma Brockes of the Guardian called the show bubble gum bright and praised the cast's strong performances. Pat Stacey of the Evening Herald described silly storylines and cheesy dialogue, calling it mile-high mediocrity.