The Flight Attendant is the latest acclaimed show that should've stayed a limited series

UPROXX

The HBO Max murder mystery thriller, based on author Chris Bohjalian's bestselling book, was originally supposed to be a limited series. But its popularity led to HBO Max ordering a second season. "Although the show’s return is welcome, season two of The Flight Attendant doesn’t feel as fresh, necessary, or as exciting because the first season was so clearly finite," says Carrie Wittmer. The Flight Attendant isn't the only popular TV show that was unnecessarily renewed. Winning Time, recently renewed for a second season, was originally announced as a limited series. The acclaimed Emmy-winning Big Little Lies Season 1 was brought back for a disappointing Season 2. And Stranger Things, originally planned as an anthology series, has been renewed with "messy, meandering seasons that... feel more like packaged 80s nostalgia and Netflix merch than a tight, cohesive story," says Wittmer, adding: "The beauty of the limited series is that they tell one story from beginning to end like a film, and thusly have more time to develop characters and plot like a television show. But over the past few years, limited series have, like absolutely everything else on the planet, become IP inspo. Limited series lose their cultural significance the further they go beyond their original one-season structure."

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• The Flight Attendant Season 2 works so well because Cassie is the worst spy of all time: "In Season 2 of The Flight Attendant, Cassie has made one shockingly good decision—to stop drinking alcohol with the help of Alcoholics Anonymous—while still managing to hold on tightly to the ability to kamikaze her life at every turn with a little help from fate and circumstance," says Jodi Walker. "Quite simply, our girl remains the worst decision-maker in the game, but unlike when you or I wake up with the distinct feeling that we had one too many martinis the night before, or made the wrong choice at work, Cassie’s errors in judgment almost always involve the federal government." Walker adds: "Watching The Flight Attendant is like living in a constant state of yelling at the heroine in a horror film not to go into the basement alone, and then she goes into the basement anyway, somehow finds a sub-basement, and that sub-basement is filled with autonomous figments of her imagination going into even more sub-basements."
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