Make room for the latest TV reboot on your DVR.
Unlike many of the other reboots making the transition from the big screen to the small one this fall, Frequency, the CW’s new drama based on the 2000 film, isn’t burdened with the same kind of legacy or fervent fanbase. Yes, it was a great movie, and it does have some passionate fans, but it’s not looked as an iconic film, like fellow new fall offerings, Fox’s Lethal Weapon and The Exorcist or CBS’ MacGyver, originals are.
And the low-key legacy of the film works to the drama’s advantage, especially with showrunner Jeremy Carver (Supernatural) deciding to make the central relationship one between a father and daughter rather than a father and a son, introducing us to Peyton List‘s Raimy, one of the best new characters on the fall TV season.
Frequency
“The idea of exploring a father-daughter relationship, where in many circumstances, sometimes it’s just limited to a daddy’s little girl type of trope…I was very interested in sort of hopefully exploding that trope, and presenting a very different kind of father/daughter relationship,” Carver explained during the show’s panel at the 2016 Summer TCA Press Tour.
Raimy is an NYPD detective whose life is turned on its head when she hears a voice on her father’s old ham radio…that voice happens to be her deceased father (played by Riley Smith) talking to her…but from 1996. The show asks the question: What would you do with a second chance? What would you tell someone if given the opportunity to talk to them again?
“[Her father] dies under mysterious circumstances…that she’s been told are that he’s a bad guy, and that he was up to no good, and you should be embarrassed, and you should spend your life trying to erase the stain he’s left on the family stain,” Peyton List told E! News of Raimy’s complicated relationship with her father, which will completely change once they begin communicating over the ham radio.
“All of a sudden you start to ask those questions of what if was not what I was told? What if none of it was true?” List said, “And you get the opportunity to say all the things you want to say to your dad, even though you know there’s no possible way this could be happening. But for them, it does.”
Anyone else just get chills?
“It is really about being able to see the butterfly effect of what really transpires after you change the past and change the future, and all the things that happen in between,” Mehki Phifer, who plays a mentor and “surrogate father” to Raimy, as he was her father’s best friend, added.
To hear more about Frequency, one of our favorite new shows of the fall season, watch our interview with the stars above.
Frequency premieres tonight, Oct. 5, at 9 p.m. on the CW.