Airline: The Complete Season 1

It's a bit of a labeling error to call this series from A&E and Britain's London Weekend Television a "reality" show, unless you're talking about the original reality genre: the documentary. In fact, there's nothing whatsoever of the exhibitionist game show about these surprisingly engrossing standalone episodes--no one gets voted out of the terminal, although some unruly passengers are escorted off the premises by security, and others storm off in a huff. For Airline, an LWT film crew observed employees of Southwest Airlines--the fourth-largest carrier in the U.S.--at both LAX and Chicago Midway airports as they wrangled thousands of passengers every day, racking up 5,000 hours of footage that's been whittled down to a little over six hours across 18 fast-moving episodes (each about 20 minutes, now that the commercials are removed). There's no overt commentary on how the managers, flight attendants, check-in clerks, and other customer-service folks handle travelers who are angry, frustrated, annoyed, very frequently drunk, and, very occasionally, perfectly pleasant in the face of overbookings, blackouts, screaming kids, cancelled flights, and unevenly applied corporate policy. But in the aggregate, while there are no continuing stories, each episode serves up an illuminating cavalcade of human behavior at its worst...and once in a rare while, its best. The double-disc set contains no extras (and due to a music rights issue, the series' original theme song--a cover of "Leaving on a Jet Plane"--is missing). Recommended. (M. Johanson)