On Sunday ABC aired the season finale of Pan Am. Whether it was the series finale remains to be seen.

The success of cable network AMC’s Mad Men prompted ABC and NBC to present their own 1960s period pieces this season. But any potential ratings battle between Pan Am and NBC’s The Playboy Club ended before it began when NBC chose to air the latter on Monday nights against CBS’ Hawaii Five-0 and ABC’s Castle. It was canceled after three episodes.

Whether or not Pan Am is renewed, it put together a credible season.

As Billy Crystal’s character Fernando from Saturday Night Live would say, Pan Am “looks MAH-velous!” The clothes and sets are detailed and plush, evoking the early 1960s jet set. All the cast members are easy on the eyes.

Some TV critics have written that the show portrays a bygone period when air travel was glamorous and fun. Some airline-industry bloggers have countered that such a view is mostly nostalgia. It doesn’t really matter — It’s a TV show, people! — because the airplanes are there to bring the characters together and transport them (literally and metaphorically) to the places the plots take them.

In each episode, the cast flies to a locale that would have been considered exotic in the early ’60s, if not so much today: London, Rome, West Berlin and Rio de Janeiro, to name a few. All the main characters have multi-episode story arcs that are impacted by the week’s setting.

The breakout cast member from Season 1 has been French Canadian actress Karine Vanasse. Her screen time increased as the season progressed, and one female viewer I know has declared Vanasse her new “girl crush.” Her character, French stewardess Colette Valois, was a blank slate in the first couple of episodes. But Vanasse’s subtle portrayal has made one of the most likable and interesting, if enigmatic characters.

Christina Ricci (Prozac Nation, Black Snake Moan, The Addams Family) is the only big name in the cast. Her character, Maggie Ryan, walks a tightrope between the circumscribed behavior expected of a Pan Am stewardess and a personal life in which she aspires to be one of the liberal intelligentsia. (No dirty hippies here.) Maggie is the risk-taker among the flight crew, always thinking she can talk her way into, or out of, anything.

Sisters Kate and Laura Cameron (Kelli Garner and and stunning Australian import Margot Robbie) round out the cabin crew. In the season premiere, Laura left her fiancé at the altar and fled her domineering mother, joining her older sister at Pan Am in hopes of becoming her own woman. Though she drove Laura’s getaway car, Kate quickly resents the responsibility she feels to protect Kate.

The resentment begins to fade when Kate is approached by the CIA, which believes that being a Pan Am stewardess is a great cover for agents and couriers. I admit: I was pretty skeptical when I read that the series would have an espionage subplot. But on a show set at the height of the Cold War, the writers make it work.

Meanwhile, Laura starts to find her niche while sharing great chemistry with co-pilot Ted Vanderway (Michael Mosley), who acts like an obnoxious frat boy but has a heart of gold — and always seems to be there when Laura needs help.

Probably the least interesting character is golden boy pilot Dean Lowery (Mike Vogel), who beds three women in the first season alone, professes to love two of them and then wonders why he ends up alone. Don’t get me wrong; Vogel does a credible acting job. But all he’s really asked to do is be handsome and (mostly) noble.

Pan Am does do a good job of referencing — if not quite tackling — the events and issues of its period. In addition to Kate’s Cold War spying:

• Maggie uses a box of cigars to talk her way onto President Kennedy’s Air Force One;
• Laura gets a hard lesson in racial inequality; and
• Colette, an orphan who believes her parents were killed by the Nazis, sees Kennedy’s historic trip to West Berlin and thinks it might be too soon to absolve the West Germans and embrace them as allies.

The question now is whether Pan Am will return for a second season. The odds appear to be against it. An entertainment column in the latest issue of New York magazine casts the situation thusly: “There’s been turbulence, but if ABC’s The River sinks further after its slow debut, it wouldn’t shock us if Pan Am got one more shot. Seems unlikely, though.”

Personally, I hope ABC renews the show. While Pan Am didn’t take me to new heights, it intrigued me enough that I’d like to see more.

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Stu Robinson, a college friend of the TV Tyrant, is a writer, editor, media-relations practitioner and social-media guy based in Phoenix.