Fly Girls

Really I didn't have very high hopes for this show, but I even had a hard time making it past the painfully stupid opening 'meet and greet' sequence. Reality television shows aren't usually my thing, but I've seen enough of The Soup and random episodes of popular shows to grasp the general idea. It's silly to think that there will be much 'reality' in any of these kinds of shows, but this one in particular is filmed in a style that stretches the imagination. I haven't seen a whole episode of The Hills, but it would still be my closest comparison to this show. While I haven't seen many television shows of this genre, I have been a flight attendant. The depiction of the job in this show is vastly disconnected from my personal experience. I worked for a regional airline, and am aware that working for a national carrier, especially a newer one, would be a very different time. However, I still feel confident saying that this show is still way off.

After struggling through the two episodes I watched I was left with less a feeling of 'being a flight attendant is cool!', or 'working for Virgin America is awesome!', and more the feeling that this show was impossibly unrealistic. From my meager research I found that at least two of the featured flight attendants are really flight attendants for Virgin America. Overall, it seems like a really nice airline to work for, but is still only really 'glamorous' for the few flight attendants featured in the show. The interpersonal conflicts are all too predictable and perfectly timed to be real. The episodes were about 40% advertisement for the airline, and 60% clumsily staged personal situations. I kept wondering if there was any way for someone to be bad at acting like themselves.

The show follows five flight attendants who work together at Virgin America and live together in what they call their 'crash pad'. Instead of the overcrowded, sparsely furnished, and hideously unhygienic crash pads I've known, they occupy a quite large, fancy, and well decorated beach house. There are scenes where they are shown working flights; in one of them one of the flight attendants gets invited to a party by a handsome passenger. Other parts of their job include working promo events and fancy charity dinners. Basically, it seems like for at least five flight attendants in the world, the job is still a non-stop party like in the early days. They do throw in some downfalls of the job, like passengers with huge bags and random rudeness. Really those are the least of a flight attendant's worries, but I'm sure they were included in order to make the show seem more realistic yet not burst the bubble of illusion.

Oddly, the mixture of awkward interpersonal drama between the shows participants, and its inclusion of actual event footage, only serve to point out the differences between the two. Viewers are clearly able to see people acting naturally around the shows' characters and contrasting with their fakeness. It made for a strange viewing experience, sort of like watching a live action movie with animated characters. This show is definitely not an accurate representation of the average flight attendant's life. Actually, if it was, then the show would be a lot more interesting and not need the staged situations. That could, in turn, make the participating airline look bad. And this show is definitely not into that.