PILOT REVIEW: Pan Am

Pan Am star Christina Ricci

Pan Am
“Pilot”
ABC
By Jack Orman (ER)
Grade: C

One of my favorite movies when I was younger was Casper. There was something about this immensely emo girl that just struck me. Since then, I’ve been a huge fan of Christina Ricci, from The Addams Family to Black Snake Moan. I even saw Speed Racer in theaters. So when I heard that Ricci has been cast in a new ABC pilot, my expectations were probably higher than most. Not to mention the absolute power that the Pan Am brand still holds in the American psyche. Pan Am was more than just an airline – it represented a change in the ways in which we lived our lives as Americans.

That’s the reason why writing a review for Pan Am has been so hard: it’s not a particularly good script. While I’m thankful that’s it not a typical ABC soap on a plane (though the typical ABC soap-style creeps in occasionally), the more serialized aspects of the show are oddly off-putting. It’s a strange combination, and underscores why the Pan Am brand was so important in the first place.

The Voice: Blind Audition, Week 2 Review

After last week’s premiere, I texted every person I knew who I thought might be remotely interested in The Voice, pleading them to watch NBC’s last try this season for an actual success. We all remember how The Marriage Ref and The Singing Bee started strong and fell to the wayside, right? But The Voice grew in its second week with a 5.6 in the 18-49, NBC seems to have a bonafide hit. I’m genuinely interested in the actual message of the show – that it’s not about a person’s look or act, but how they’d sound on the radio. Is this naïve of me? Maybe. It’s still reality television, after all. And even after a less than perfect second round of blind auditions, I’m still giddy for what’s to come.