Like so many people, I loved the movie Frequency with Jim Cavaziel and Dennis Quaid. I haven’t been sure what to think about this new rendition of Frequency as a television series, and even after the premiere I am not sure how it will stand up.
The season premiere did a good job of capturing the essence of the original Frequency and establishing characters quickly and early on. Already Peyton List, who plays the main character of Raimy Sullivan, has played a convincing Detective with daddy issues. Riley Smith, who plays Frank Sullivan (Raimy’s father) did a good job as well of staying somewhat ambiguous at first so that the audience didn’t know if he was a cop who turned dirty or he was set up. The premiere quickly sets the stage with Raimy’s 28th birthday and her divulging to her fiancee all that happened with her father before he was killed. After the discovery of the radio on the garage, the view is thrust into much the same scene as the movie where Raimy and Frank interact with quickly come to believe each other and Frank is warned of his death. There is conspiracy and dirty cops and all of the action from the movie in just this one episode.
Not surprisingly Frank’s life is saved and Raimy feels the differences immediately. She is able to both remember when he was murdered and when he wasn’t. And although in her new reality her father was still killed later in life in a car accident, she is able to have memories of him. She is ecstatic at first until she realizes–like so many of our characters on shows this season–that this change in the time line also changed many other things. Now the nurse’s body that they found from a serial killing years ago is not a stranger, but is her mother. In saving her father’s life, somehow she made her mother the target of a serial killer and her mother was killed instead. Again this parallels the movie Frequency. One difference is that in the series, Raimy is engaged. As she rushes to meet her fiancee at the end of the show she is shocked and surprised that he does not know her and that he is engaged to someone else.
In this one simple act of saying her father’s life, she has lost both her mother and her fiancee. No good deed goes unpunished. As far as how all of this will play out as a series, I am not sure where exactly they can go other than to follow the sequence of the movie. What surprises and new reveals that will be different from the movie plot at this point have not been hinted at. It was good and yet it is still unclear how it will hold up against all of the other new shows on tv that have something new and exciting to offer.
