As a TV critic, I no longer feel guilty about all those best-shows-I’m-not-watching. That list is long, and life is short.
Still, I’m impressed by the persistence of the CW.
The network of “Arrow” and “The Flash” (and now “Supergirl”) has also been taking chances on smart, entertaining shows like “Jane the Virgin” and “Crazy Ex-Girlfriend,” whose heroines’ superpowers aren’t quite so obvious.
Given the record for those last two, which will return soon, but whose ratings so far haven’t matched critics’ raves, I wouldn’t blame the CW if it stopped giving us new toys until we played with the ones we already have.
Instead, it’s giving us more.
“No Tomorrow” is another woman-centric, hour-long comedy. “Frequency” is a sci-fi drama inspired by the 2000 film. The Dennis Quaid-Jim Caviezel movie has been reimagined as a story about a police detective (Peyton List, “Blood & Oil”) who’s trying to save her long-dead father (Riley Smith, “Nashville”), and it packs the emotional punch of the original.
List is Raimy Sullivan, whose police officer father, Frank, was killed in 1996, when she was 8. When she’s inexplicably reconnected to him through his old ham radio, she gets what she thinks is a second chance for both of them. Nothing, of course, will prove that simple.
Tori Anderson (“Killjoys”) stars in “No Tomorrow” as Evie, a rules-driven worker bee whose career ambitions are being stifled by her harridan of a boss (Amy Pietz) and whose future with her low-talker of a boyfriend (Jesse Rath) looks dull.
But at least it’s a future.
When Evie meets Xavier (Joshua Sasse, “Galavant”), he seems perfect (she appears to be able to overlook the wool cap in shirtsleeve weather, even if I can’t). Any relationship with Xavier, though, could have a short shelf life: He’s convinced the world will end in eight months, 12 days; is working through a bucket list; and he’d like Evie to be his date for the apocalypse.
“Frequency” and “No Tomorrow” add to the CW’s already broader-than-usual collection of young female characters, who range from gutsy single mom Jane Villanueva (Gina Rodriguez) of “Jane the Virgin” to Liv Moore (Rose McIver), a medical student whose promising career was derailed by an inconvenient attack of undeadness in “iZombie” (scheduled to return midseason).
There’s not a Kardashian wannabe in the bunch.
Based on a Brazilian series, “No Tomorrow” begins from as absurd a premise as “Jane the Virgin” (in which a woman who has never had sex becomes pregnant) or “Crazy Ex-Girlfriend” (a musical in which Rachel Bloom plays a lawyer who moves across the country after a chance encounter with her summer-camp boyfriend).
The conflict between Evie’s ambitions and Xavier’s seize-the-day spirit isn’t quite so absurd, though (or limited to millennials). This pilot’s not quite as clever as those for “Jane” or “Crazy Ex-Girlfriend” were, but it’s charming fun.
And still maybe more than we deserve. Or have time for.
