HBO’s new thriller The Flight Attendant proves we underestimated Kaley Cuoco

Kaley Cuoco’s epic new thriller TV series has exposed an entirely new string to her acting bow.

When you’re talking about someone as famous as Kaley Cuoco, it’s hard to use the word “underrated.”

The woman starred in 279 episodes of the most popular sitcom of our time. Unknown, she is not.

But just because we’ve been watching Cuoco for years that doesn’t mean we’ve truly seen her.

The first three episodes of her new thriller The Flight Attendant drop on Binge tonight – and it proves Cuoco is one of our great actors, on par with the likes of Sarah Paulson and Emma Stone; We as a society have just been too blind to see it before now.

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The Flight Attendant hits streaming on BINGE tonight. Picture: Supplied/HBO

It’s not as if Cuoco’s acting expertise is anything new. Her limitless charm and perfect timing almost single-handedly carried The Big Bang Theory through its first couple seasons.

At the beginning, Johnny Galecki’s Leonard may have waffled between being too creepy and too sickly sweet and Jim Parsons’ Sheldon may have started off as too abrasive, but Cuoco’s Penny was fully formed from the get-go.

She was the messy girl next door, a woman who was more likely to pour you a glass of wine rather than actually help you solve a problem. No matter if you loved or hated The Big Bang Theory, Penny was faultless.

In a show as critically controversial as this one, that’s a feat.

If The Big Bang Theory allowed the actor to stretch her charm, The Flight Attendant actively challenges it.

On a surface level you shouldn’t like Cuoco’s Cassie Bowden. Whenever she’s faced with the option of being A) responsible or B) irresponsible, Cassie will always choose option C. What’s option C, you ask? It’s haphazardly cleaning up the crime scene after waking up next to a dead body.

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Michiel Luisman and Kaley Cuoco star in a scene from The Flight Attendant. Picture: Supplied/HBO

It’s choosing to get plastered at a club before meeting up with the police.

It’s taking the least responsible option you can imagine, drowning it in vodka, topping it with a rum floater, and downing it in one gulp.

That sort of person should be so insufferably reckless they’re irredeemable.

Yet in Cuoco’s hands Cassie doesn’t feel annoying at all, but relatable. The star’s performance feels just as desperate, erratic, and crazed as her character, only this time it’s intentional.

As Cuoco flings herself from one of Cassie’s missteps to another, her panic feels so real it becomes next to impossible to judge her.

Yes, cleaning up a crime scene is a bad idea. But if you woke up next to the nearly decapitated corpse of your latest hook-up while in Thailand, a country known for its unforgiving legal system, what would you do? Would you remain calm and keep a level head?

Absolutely not. You’d have a panic attack, almost cry, leave your fingerprints everywhere, and make a million little well-intentioned mistakes that look nefarious when murder is on the table.

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Kaley Cuoco is exceptional in the series.

So much of television is defined by unbelievably cool men and women, people who know exactly how to handle the betrayal of a close friend or a hit man on their tail.

Cassie Bowden isn’t one of those antiheroes. Cassie is us. She’s messy, wide-eyed, kind of dumb, and freaking the hell out to her very core.

We have Kaley Cuoco to thank for showing us all how we’d actually react to a murder. I don’t know about you, but that’s representation I desperately needed.

The Flight Attendant hits streaming on Binge tonight

This story originally appeared on Decider and has been reproduced here with permission