When Raimy Sullivan fiddles with her father’s dusty old ham radio and hears his voice, she’s surprised.
Probably because he died in 1996, which was 20 years ago.
The CW’s new Frequency, which premieres Wednesday at 9 p.m. ET, comes out of the box with that intriguing premise, delivered in a way that’s both refreshingly crisp and reassuringly understandable.
Where a lot of sci-fi shrouds itself in dark mystery, often literally dark, Frequency lays its spooky premise right out there in the open.
It’s a technique that has worked for other shows on the network, like iZombie, and is now being applied to a reworking of the 2000 movie also named Frequency.
Raimy (Peyton List, left) is a New York detective who seems plagued by restlessness. Her father Frank (Riley Smith, top), who was also a cop, died during an undercover operation in 1996, and the official verdict was that he had turned bad.
So despite the fact she’s engaged to the seemingly appealing Daniel (Daniel Bonjour, below left), she’s got this hole in her life.
One night she’s out in the garage, fooling with the ham radio that was her father’s favorite avocation, when it crackles to life and she hears a voice that intrigues her.
She and the voice get to talking baseball, and she realizes that when she gets to the 1996 World Series, the owner of this voice doesn’t seem to know the outcome.
She goes through the five stages of a sci-fi target: amusement, confusion, frustration, shock and acceptance. She’s really talking to someone from 1996 and that someone seems to be, yup, her father.
And wait, maybe he hadn’t turned bad after all.
Knowing the outcome of his last mission as well as the outcome of the World Series, she tells him how he can avoid being fatally shot.
Those last two paragraphs may sound like spoilers. In fact, they’re the setups for the way Frequency hopes to spin a two-hour movie into an ongoing television series.
By saving Frank’s life, Raimy has inadvertently changed all subsequent history.
Daniel, for instance, doesn’t know her any more. Not like “I don’t know you any more because you think you’re talking to your dead father on a ham radio” but more like “Who are you, lady? Sorry, but I’ve never seen you before.”
The collateral damage piles up quickly enough that Raimy realizes she needs to do something fast, or her “fix” will have pretty much wrecked everything.
She returns to the ham radio, and Frequency begins the rest of its life.
Fortunately for Raimy, she has help, much of it coming from a strong performance by Mekhi Phifer as Satch Rayna, who was Frank’s partner in 1996 and now is Raimy’s boss. Small world.
Frequency is a better time-travel show than Timeless, which isn’t saying a lot, but does correctly suggest we care about the characters.
It still may be that the movie had the right idea by wrapping up its story in two hours. But following their adventure for a while feels like a risk worth taking.