'Pan Am' on ABC HD

Better tune to ABC, 'cuz that's where it is!

Fixed title. Saw the screener and will DVR it every week. Nice twist toward the end that just about every reviewer has happily spoiled. Pretty obvious they're trying to capitalize on "Mad Men's" period-piece success. Jury's out over whether that'll happen.

But hey, hot girls having sex and mixing business with intrigue? It's candy. I'll watch.

I'll be interested to see episode 2. Because the producers sold a pilot they can't afford to make week after week, and they know it. It will be fascinating to see what they cut to make their budget every week.

Expect to see more plane interiors and less CGI exteriors (which weren't that good anyway).

The open-air jetways shown at LaGuardia or Kennedy (Idlewild) - whichever it was meant to be - look more space-age than what are in use today. They looked like they must have been fixed walkways and the plane had to pull up close to it. The CGI as a whole painted too pretty of a picture. The sun was practically setting the entire way to London.

I enjoyed it enough to keep watching. Just hope it doesn't start to come off as a derivative of other shows.

Yeah, whatever the show's CGI budget is, they should just cut it entirely because it looked terrible.

Or maybe that's just a reflection of how much they were forced to stretch their budget even on the pilot, in which case I'm as interested as the person who commented above that they can't afford to keep this going on a weekly basis in seeing what they do the next couple of episodes.

I enjoyed it. Pilots always blow the VFX budget (ahem Lost was the most expensive pilot in history it very nearly became a miniseries), but on Pan Am it seemed like they were very conscientious of what could be shot practically and what had to be done with VFX or set extensions. There were a lot of FX shots in this show, but probably no more than a show like the pilot of Star Trek: The Next Generation would've had when it first premiered. Both TNG and Lost, however, were 2-hour premieres. The problem with television is that you don't have the time (sometimes commercials and music videos have more time) or the money to invest in FX shots, especially if you have a lot of them, so its tough to get the quality up to feature film standards. Most TV shows just cannot afford Digital Domain or Lucas, and more importantly the breakneck speed of production makes it very difficult. Everything has to be done quickly.

I'm hopeful for this show. It had a strong cast, great production design, nice cinematography (though very clearly shot on an Alexa, the digital-ness of it almost makes the era look too snappy as opposed to the more textured film look of Mad Men).

This show has some heavy hitters and big guns behind it though. Tommy Schlamme (who directed the pilot) was a producer and director on both ER and The West Wing and created the distinctive energetic styles of both shows. Also Sid Ganis is an old school Hollywood producer who's been around since Methuselah, so ABC might actually be able to turn this show into something.

Correction. No TV show can. Furthermore, DD and ILM would have no idea how to work at a normal episodic pace. The show would be airing before ILM even had a bid out on the job. They do the best work in the world, but they are a very slow moving machine. Which is why, when Lucas was considering at TV show based on Star Wars, he was consulting with television oriented VFX firms. He and is people were smart enough to know they could not have produced that in-house. They just aren't designed for that pace.

Well I'm still mad at ABC for cancelling All My Children. And soon One Life To Live. They have enough cheesey talk shows already. The AMC cliffhanger was good on Friday and that show should continue somewhere other than the internet. Who did J.R. shoot? Is Erica Kane really dead? Surely it can be so ... Anyhow, sorry to digress. My mother watched Pan Am and seemed to like it.

The captain engages the thrust on their maiden voyage and out comes sappy music?....what the fr@k? Jet engines were silent in the 60s?

My DVR's got it, but I won't watch it until I see the ratings in the morning. Read a bunch of positive reviews, and based on my love for aviation I'm probably going to like it, but if Playboy's ratings were any indication, this will crash and burn.

You wont watch it until you see the ratings? Why does that matter? So if the ratings are bad will you just delete it w/o ever watching?

Some people are reluctant to invest time, attention, emotional energy in scripted shows that are likely to be cancelled early. I understand their position.

I have a lot of shows - and this will probably be one of them - that I'll DVR and park. If they do well, I'll catch up. Of course, thanks to my job, I have to watch a lot more television than I'd really care to. Left to my own devices, I'd never watch any singing competition shows. SO burned on those.

I saw this, and I am not really into romance/love story type shows, but it kept me watching the full hour and didn't put me to sleep. I think the show has a good chance of staying around a while.

The only thing I like so far about Pan Am was the Grace Potter version of Fly Me To The Moon used in one of the promos, the score in the pilot was pretty decent too. I don't like or care about any of the characters,and it's hard to believe Mike Vogel (the pilot) was considered to play Kirk in the 2009 movie, he completely lacks charisma.

Well, it seems they have resurrected the spirit of Robert Burks, because photography the pilot looked like North by Northwest, except with a little more diffusion. You hear lots of things being described as "slick", but Pan Am was, and then some. Everyone was acting as if everything was earthshaking and important, and the music was terribly insistent, full of John Williams-ish uplifiting themes for planes taking off with lots of horns and sad themes for unhappiness with clarinets. I admit to being genuinely moved by the final shot of the four stews boarding the plane in slow motion with the ending of Bobby Darin's version of "Mack the Knife'' on the soundtrack.

It's watchable but it thinks itself very important and hammers home its themes relentlessly.

As far as TV pilots go, it wasn't bad. The primary function of a pilot is to introduce the audience to the "world" of the show. If you can get anything more than that out of it, consider yourself lucky.

As one, who remembers Pan Am and all the hoopla of the 60's, on nostalgia alone, makes it worth a look for me. At first I was not sure about the "spy" connection in the story line, but I am sure that happened much more than anyone will ever know. The Cold War of the 60's was a nasty place and time, and Pan Am was in the perfect place to be a facilitator, since it was an "unofficial" part of the government getting special exemptions and privileges other airlines of the times didn't get for favors. That is one of the reasons it failed. They got too used to the government looking after them instead of running it like a business.

Anyway, I am going to hang with it awhile and see how it works out. It gets a season pass at this point.

The world of the show and usage of physical props: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000...391921594.html

Ratings for Pan Am weren't bad. In the middle of the pack. 3.1. The second half hour loss was only down slightly from the first, a good sign that people are sticking around and watching. It also held 100% of its lead-in. Another good sign. But the weeks to come will tell the story. Pun intended.

Like the line, "But friends convinced him to screen the show in the Pan Am cabin in his garage, which boasts one modern-day update: a flat-screen TV."

Man can not live without his flat-screen TV. I am just sayin'.

I thought the nostalgia was a very nice change from the craze of today, so to speak, and the spy portion I think was what kept me tuned in to see what was going to happen with it. This on top of those flight attendants in the bright blue uniforms with their smiles and no cell phones going all over the place was such a breath of fresh air. No TSA groping women and children too.

What would people do today without their cell phones? Sometimes I think we don't know how good we had it back before all this technology. People actually talked to each other when they had something to say, instead of hitting up facebook.

Now if the story starts to take a turn with nothing but romance, and no action aspect, I will likely turn it off.

Yeah, I'm one of those people. I become invested in a show even to the extent of talking to the screen. I DVR everything, and USUALLY wait until the show is well established before beginning to watch. It isn't fair to cancel something a plot driven series in mid season. I can cite many examples of this happening, remember THE NINE which the critics said would be the best show that year, and which never did reveal the "great" ending. How about PERSONS UNKNOWN, V, the KILLING (yeah, I know) as just a few examples. Look at the outrage over RUBICON.

Thanks for that link. I will watch the show based on their effort to be exact and show it like it was.

Yet somehow they decided that they were going to make the 60's smoke-free.

Lol, that because after Mad Men there were no smokes left.

I wish they could have at least gotten the nav lights right.

Watch it. This is the best pilot I have seen in a long time. Every one of the main characters has been developed. The story lines have been neatly set up. Great music and pacing. The very last scene with the four ladies walking in sync with the little girl gawking in amazement was fabulous. Can't wait until next week!

According to an article in Entertainment Weekly, Disney said no to the showing of any smoking on the show.