Judging the Fall Season: The CW's New Shows
The CW presented the network’s fall TV schedule on Thursday, and it has released trailers for its two new fall shows. (Sorry, the buzzed-about Archie Comics show Riverdale is a midseason entry.) Let’s look at them with a sharp eye. Note: All judgments are based solely on the clips and are not reviews of entire episodes, which are not yet available.
No Tomorrow
Uptight young woman (Tori Anderson) meets hot guy (Joshua Sasse), who tells her the world’s going to end in eight months and 12 days, so why not quit your job and do everything on your bucket list? That’s the premise of this romantic comedy, and while his list (“run with the bulls, try psychedelics”) is more adventuresome than hers (“sing in public”), it makes for an energetic trailer, doesn’t it? Whether you buy into No Tomorrow depends on how engaged you are by the leads (she’s charming; he seemed smarmy, but maybe that’s just me) and the premise (it verges on fantasy). As wish-fulfillment for an audience tied down to the workaday world, maybe this will catch on for a lot of viewers — or enough viewers for a modest, CW-size hit.
Frequency
Another of the fall’s time-travel/supernatural-ish new shows, Frequency (based on the 2000 film) is about a cop played by Peyton List (a CW stalwart from The Tomorrow People and The Flash) whose father, also a cop, died 20 years earlier. But as you see in the trailer, that standby of pop-culture world-altering — a bolt of lightning — transforms an old ham radio into a way to communicate with dead dad, altering her character’s past and present. List makes a good lead, and the show looks pleasingly complicated in the way its premise is doled out. Sorta promising.
Related:
Judging the Fall Season: NBC’s New Shows
Judging the Fall Season: CBS’s New Shows
