Glamour in the air

So you think your dress code is strict?

On “Pan Am,” the flight attendants of – scratch that, stewardesses, in that they are all stewardesses – are weighed before boarding the airplane. Never mind their crisp blue uniforms and perfectly coiffed hair, their undergarments are scrutinized – down to the run in their stockings.

Casual Fridays are entirely out of the question.

As for accessories, they can’t even wear a wedding ring. If they get married, they can’t be stewardesses anymore.

Not only that, but this is regarded as the pinnacle of liberation for young women in the early 1960s.

The series premiere of “Pan Am” Sunday on ABC gave us a lot to absorb about flight service then and now. Security is running your carry-on through an X-ray machine. Passengers no less than the flight attendants are dressed to the nines -- air travel is still considered something of an event.

And this one especially. We open with the maiden flight of Pan Am’s intercontinental jet service, billed to cross from New York to Paris in 6-1/2 hours and to be smooth as glass -- although no one seems terribly put out by a bit of turbulence halfway through.

The experience seems to be something of an upscale lounge in the skies, where passengers revel in luxurious treatment, all under the attentive care of gloriously beautiful stewardesses.

Laura is one of them. She’s become instantly famous as the face of Pan Am on the cover of Life magazine, running in advance of the new flight service. Six months ago she was a runaway bride, hungry for life experience, afraid of being stifled by tradition. She tells her sister, Kate, a Pan Am stewardess and spy, “I want to see the world!” And she means to. They drive off as her wedding quartet is starting the prelude, infuriating their mother.

Wait ... a spy? Yes! Pan Am stewardesses fly all over the world, so what could be less suspicious? Kate is tasked with switching out a passport in the course of the flight for some suspected Soviet spy they wish to detain at customs.

Piece of cake, right? Except when she drops the passport during a spate of turbulence and spills coffee all over it in the clumsiest confluence of events conceivable. These are meant to be icons of beauty and grace, she’s meant to switch out one simple thing, and she’s spilling things all over and behaving like Betty Suarez from “Ugly Betty.”

Intrigue

And she’s not even having the most awkward time of it. Colette is trapped on the intercontinental flight with her boyfriend’s wife. “How very French of you,” says Christina Ricci as Maggie, the purser, flown in from midtown at the last second – she changed into her uniform in the cab ride over.

Colette isn’t sure if the wife is hip to the affair, but she is constantly fussing at Colette to sit, to join them, to serve this or that need while the husband remains luxuriously aloof -- and, at the end of the flight, she tells Colette pointedly not to sleep with married men.

Personalities waiting to develop include Dean, the pilot with movie star good looks, and his sort of Major Healey-type co-pilot who wants to be interesting but isn’t. Dean is engaged to be married to the largely absent Bridget, a Pan Am stewardess who went missing before the flight and he’s concerned about her whereabouts. Along with her involvement in the tense Bay of Pigs airlift from Castro’s Cuba, Bridget also had some brief on-screen contact with the mysterious intelligence agent who roped Kate into that whole passport switch-eroo, so there’s probably a darker story there waiting to be told.

The reasonably talented cast is showcased in a glorious setting of gleaming glass and chrome in the airport, the opulent appointments of the sky lounge aboard the jet and the glamorous no-expense-spared wedding Laura fled.

Between the crisp uniforms on the flight staff -- and it’s hard to imagine anyone’s weighing the pilots before they can take the helm -- and the upscale fashions on the passengers, it feels like a natural extension of the spacious offices and perfectly presented staff of the Sterling Cooper ad agency in the first seasons of AMC’s “Mad Men.”

Of course, “Mad Men” also follows its characters into seedy bars, apartments, upscale and less upscale homes, upscale and less upscale restaurants, and is photographed so perfectly you can almost smell the layers of cigarette smoke coating the walls.

And while the Pan Am pilot rarely featured any persons of color -- and to be fair, neither show has many -- “Mad Men” actually opened its series premiere with advertising genius Don Draper in a bar talking to an older black man about his preferred brand of smokes.

Maybe “Pan Am” will expand its view beyond the glamorous and dig a little bit further into people’s lives. We got a brief glimpse of Maggie’s not-fabulous apartment. We’ve seen where these people work. Maybe we’ll see a little bit more about how they live.

For now, I thought it got off to a great start and I’m looking forward to seeing more. New epiodes of “Pan Am” air at 10/9c Sundays on ABC.