‘Frequency’: A Time-Jumping Father-Daughter Mystery
A reworking of the 2000 film that starred Jim Caviezel and Dennis Quaid as son and father, Frequency sets up a different dynamic. Peyton List (Mad Men, As the World Turns) stars as police detective Raimy Sullivan, who discovers she can communicate with her dead father, police officer Frank Sullivan (Riley Smith, from Nashville) via the old man’s ham radio. (Don’t worry, kids — just click that link if you aren’t sure what a “ham radio” is.) Through ghostly communication, they try to solve an old crime, and probably, in future episodes, work through family skeletons in the closet.
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Raimy makes contact with her dad the day before he’s supposed to have died in 1996, and when she messes with that event via the radio, things occur that I can’t spoil. But you can probably imagine them, given your extensive familiarity with TV shows that mess with timelines, from The Twilight Zone to this week’s debut Timeless.
There’s an undercurrent of strong emotion running through Frequency — Riley’s love for her father, who died a disgraced cop — that helps carry the show over some of its patchier dramatic leaps. And there’s a serial killer subplot, if you aren’t tired of that kind of thing. Oh, and there’s Mekhi Phifer as Riley’s cop-mentor, and he’s good at portraying wise world-weariness. But it’s really the father-daughter bonding — along with Riley’s relationship with her boyfriend, played by Daniel Bonjour — that is going to appeal most to the CW’s viewership. The show is no out-of-the-box winner, but it has possibilities to become an intriguing nighttime soap with sparks of electricity.
Frequency airs Wednesday nights at 9 p.m. ET on the CW.
