BOTTLING IT (THE FLIGHT ATTENDANT)

And the winner of this year's most irritating TV drama is...

Steve Yockey's wannabe Hitchcockian thriller 'The Flight Attendant' has been one of the big TV hits of lockdown.

Starring 'Big Bang Theory' star Kaley Cuoco, it was released on HBO Max in the US at the tail end of 2020, coming to Sky One (as it used to be known) in the UK and Ireland in March of this year.

The series picked up Golden Globe, Screen Actors Guild and Emmy nominations by the score and a second season has already been commissioned.

But it also has the most annoying narrative device of any show this past year.

Kaley Cuoco plays Cassie Bowden, a flight attendant who gives flight attendants a terrible name.

Cassie likes to party hard in between work, guzzling loads of booze and having loads of one night stands.

On a flight to Bangkok, she meets Steven Gerrard lookalike, Michiel Huisman's suave Alex Sokolov.

They flirt and then meet up in Bangkok for an epic binge, retiring to a hotel room.

Waking up the following morning, she discovers Alex beside her with his throat slashed.

Panicking, Cassie flees the hotel to join her fellow crew members before the hotel staff and police find the body.

A call to her best friend, Zosia Mamet's attorney Ani Mouradian reaffirms her view that she doesn't want to be caught by the Thai police with a murdered corpse.

Dashing to the airport, she makes it on the flight back to New York along with fellow crew members, Rosie Perez's Megan Briscoe and Griffin Matthews' Shane Evans.

However by the time the flight lands, word of Alex's death in Bangkok has surfaced and FBI agents are waiting to talk to the flight crew, given he was on their flight to the Thai capital.

At first Cassie ignores the tannoy request for her and her colleagues to wait at the gate but she ends up getting hauled back by security.

During questioning from Merle Dandridge and Nolan Gerard Funk's FBI agents Kim Hammond and Van White, Cassie is nervous and appears really evasive.

But here's the really irritating part.

Cassie starts to get troubled by frequent apparitions of the murder victim in her subconscious that transport her back to the Bangkok hotel room.

In these imaginary conversations with Alex, she tries to piece together details of their night together that were buried in an alcoholic haze.

However Alex also insists on delving into her past, revealing uncomfortable truths about her relationships with her family and with alcohol.

As Cassie tries to piece together what really happened in Bangkok, she soon realises she is being hunted in New York by Michelle Gomez's ruthless Glaswegian assassin Miranda who joined her and Alex on their night out.

Recruiting her best friend Ani and her boyfriend Denis Akdeniz's Max, she tries to juggle her investigation into Alex's past with a budding relationship with Colin Woodell's deeply smitten Buckley Ware.

At the same time, she also tried to maintain a strained relationship with her brother, TR Knight's Davey Bowden and his daughters.

The more she delves into the history of Alex, the more it becomes clear that Cassie has been caught in an international arms conspiracy.

And the more she has to convince the FBI that she did not murder Alex.

Yockey and his team of writers Kara Lee Corthron, Ryan Jennifer Jones, Ian Weinreich, Ticona S Joy, Jess Meyer, Meredith Lavender and Marcie Ulin attack their script with great enthusiasm, treating Cassie's adventures as if they were straight out of 'North by Northwest'.

But while Cary Grant's Roger O Thornhill was full of old school, uncomplicated charm, Cuoco's Cassie is meant to be a hot mess but is a really frustrating one.

Throughout the eight episodes Cassie is self-absorbed and reckless, leaving a trail of murder and mayhem in her wake with little regard for her friends.

She is also incredibly dumb, compounding many of the problems she is in, yet  somehow bumbling through and avoiding death.

Cuoco and her directors, Susanna Fogel, Tom Vaughan, John Strickland, Glen Winter, Batan Silva and Marcos Siega seem to have decided she is the 21st Century successor to Goldie Hawn.

So Cassie is reduced to being the ditsy, lucky to survive blonde.

As well as aping Hitchcock, the writers and directors appear to be a little too much in love with the black comedy of 'Killing Eve' and its knowing winks to the audience before meting out some casual violence.

Bodies are easily dispatched and Gomez's assassin Miranda is straight out of the adventures of Villanelle.

As a result, 'The Flight Attendant' feels frothy and derivative.

While Cuoco has a certain charm, some viewers will begin to tire of Cassie very quickly.

She isn't helped by the frequent deep dives into her subconscious which are gimmicky and disrupt the flow of the narrative.

These scenes do Huisman no favours either, with his character coming across as very smug.

As for Mamet, she spends most of her time being stressed as Ani which is understandable.

Gomez's role is very slight, as is Ritchie Coster as her assassin boss Victor.

And while Dandridge is a warm presence, Funk does his best to make his fellow FBI agent one of the most wooden ever committed to the screen.

Perez is sent off on a ridiculous subplot about her assisting North Korea to spy on the company her husband, Terry Serpico's Bill Briscoe works for 

Bebe Neuwirth is also wasted in a minor role as Ani's boss.

TR Knight, Griffin Matthews, Denis Akdenis and Colin Woodell dutifully serve the plot but have nothing special to offer.

Although it has to be said the animated opening credits is one of the best things about the show, playing out to Blake Neely's tense, staccato theme tune like a Hitchcock title sequence.

Brian Burgoyne and his fellow cinematographers Adrian Peng Correia, Jay Feather and Hillary Spera do a superb job with the slick visuals of the show.

However 'The Flight Attendant' is undermined by a silly narrative structure and the dreadful stereotyping of its central hero.

It only underlines just how shrewd a storyteller Hitchcock was - not that we needed reminded - and what a drag it would have been had he interrupted 'North By Northwest,' 'The Foreign Correspondent' or 'The Man Who Knew Too Much' with imaginary, self-absorbed conversations occurring in his lead character's subconscious.

The programme makers have given Cuoco a green light for a second bite at 'The Flight Attendant'.

Let's hope she is biting into something much more substantial than this slight, unappetising dish.

('The Flight Attendant' was released on HBO Max in the US on November 26, 2020 and aired on Sky One in the UK and Ireland on March 19-May 7, 2021)