Pan Am

A gorgeous production, though the story sometimes keeps it on the tarmac.

The glamour in Pan Am may indeed be manufactured--doubly manufactured, given the re-created places and planes--but it's not empty: The show says, yes, this is as good as it looks, and it looks very good

The female leads are appealing, the world promising and the pilot much more clear-eyed and less compromised in its view of the era than "Playboy Club" is.

The romance and the attractively stylized innocence of the era is addictive, but the espionage plot, with its link to political history, is absurd.

The new shows are more concerned with hitting their marks and getting the sociology right than with character, but Pan Am has a bit of style to it, and a note of darkness, and the formula might just work.

If only for the costumes and '60s music, Pan Am is amusing to see at least once, but if it has any instructive benefit at all, it's as a mood indicator for these times, not those.

It has neither the exactitude of the times nor the talent of the writers to get at the issues, ala Mad Men, that illuminate the issues of the day.