Investigating NANCY DREW

Article first published as TV Review: NANCY DREW on Seat42F.

After the success of Riverdale, it’s not surprising that the CW looked for other well-known properties to darken and expound upon. Enter NANCY DREW, which premiered this week, and was developed by CW staples Josh Schwartz and Stephanie Savage, along with Noga Landau. The drama finds the famous literary girl detective entering adulthood and dealing with the death of her mother, surrounded by peers who she doesn’t consider friends. Toss in sex and the supernatural, and NANCY DREW is adapted into a show typical for the network’s fare.

Nancy Drew is an obvious character to undergo this treatment. She’s already been adapted into television and movies multiple times, each with their own take on the sleuth. She also evolved over the years in her book series, changing with the times. So there isn’t a definitive version of the heroine that the series must live up to. Instead, for a character that has already proven highly malleable, there’s a long leash as to what can be done with her.

Virtual newcomer Kennedy McMann stars as the titular character in this version. In keeping with the network’s other programming, Nancy is surrounded by a group of friends, not totally unheard of in the written works, but also not nearly so present in most iterations. They include her current hookup, Ned Nickerson (Tunji Kasim, Nearly Famous), old nemesis and boss George Fan (Leah Lewis, Guidance), rich girl and fellow waitress Bess Marvin (Maddison Jaizani, Versailles), and a new addition to the lore, perhaps to make the cast more gender balanced, burnout dishwasher Ace (Alex Saxon, The Fosters).

And in keeping with CW formula, there are a couple of adults tangentially involved. These include Nancy’s dad, lawyer Carson (Scott Wolf, The Night Shift, Party of Five) and his love interest, Detective Karen Hart (Alvina August, Chilling Adventures of Sabrina), as well as socialite Ryan Hudson (Riley Smith, Proven Innocent).

NANCY DREW has a ton of clichés for a teen drama, even if the main characters might not quite be teens anymore. They are more advanced in their careers than most people their age, with George running the diner and Ned having his own autobody shop. There’s at least one who engages in inappropriate behavior with a much older adult. There’s forced drama between them, with Ned boasting a criminal past, even though there’s zero tension that he might actually be dangerous. And the small town setting allows for huge coincidences, like the fact that Nancy’s father represented Ned in court and keeps his file readily accessible to her.

But that’s not all that NANCY DREW has working against it. It just feels flat. While I don’t think any of the actors, taken separately, are horrible, none are stand-outs, either. The pacing is weird, the twists feel forced, and the story feels gimmicky. The supernatural element comes across as forced in. The romantic aspects are unbelievable. The murder mystery and town lore isn’t compelling. Not to mention, a big chunk of the pilot is just a huge exposition dump, which isn’t a great way to start a series. Backstory is told to us right off the bat, rather than doled out over time as the tale progresses.

Even Nancy’s mother death, which could be formative, is hokey, used as an excuse for the cheery Nancy to go dark, making her backstory the lighter substance of what the character usually is, though I can’t imagine anyone being cheery in the environment presented, clashing with the tone of the show. Veronica Mars did this same type of story so much better, and with a new season of that having dropped just a few short months ago, this will definitely suffer by comparison.

In case you couldn’t tell, I didn’t like NANCY DREW. While I may not be the show’s target demographic, I usually enjoy shows in this vein, new and old, including Riverdale, Dawson’s Creek, Chilling Adventures of Sabrina, The Vampire Diaries, and even Gossip Girl. I appreciate a good soapy spectacle, even if it’s a bit fluffy. However, NANCY DREW just doesn’t have enough attractive elements going to reach even someone predisposed to like it, so I can’t recommend it.

If you want to anyway, NANCY DREW airs Wednesdays on the CW.

The Right FREQUENCY

Article first published as FREQUENCY Review on Seat42F.

The CW continues television’s reboot / adaptation trend with FREQUENCY. Based on the 2000 film of the same name, FREQUENCY finds a police officer, Raimy Sullivan, communicating with her long-dead father through a ham radio. When Raimy tries to change the past and save his life, the consequences spin out in a butterfly effect, and she soon has a litany of other problems to deal with.

If one wasn’t aware of the plot of the film, one might think, based on the beginning of the pilot, that this is going to be your typical cop show. Being a TV reviewer and having to watch hundreds of shows every year, I have gotten very tired of the repetitive formula that pervades so much of broadcast network programming. Thus, I was already well on my way to tuning it out when the twists started to occur. If you’re like me and pretty much done with that genre, hang in there, because FREQUENCY doesn’t stay in it too long.

Instead, we’re getting a relatively straight-forward mystery that soon becomes convoluted through changes in the timeline. It won’t surprise you to learn (and this is spoiled on Wikipedia and in press materials) that Raimy (Peyton List, Mad Men, The Tomorrow People) manages to stop daddy Frank (Riley Smith, Nashville, The Messengers) from dying. Which Raimy barely has time to be glad about before her mother, Julie (Devin Kelley, Resurrection), disappears, having been taken out by a serial killer in the new narrative. How is the serial killer connected to Frank’s death? Assuming Frank isn’t the killer, which seems unlikely, we don’t yet know.

This is an intriguing question, to be sure, and one that promises to get more tricky as time goes on. The format of FREQUENCY looks to be that Raimy and Frank will have to work together across time to keep making their lives and their loved ones’ lives better, but every time they achieve that in some way, there will be a backslide. Thus, things will continue to get messy, and a happy ending will be a long way off.

There are a few interesting decisions FREQUENCY makes that I’m not sure every version of this story would choose. Frank is still dead in 2016, albeit from a different cause quite a bit later in life, so they can’t be side by side, nor, given the second cause of his passing, is this likely to change over the course of the show (at least not until the end), keeping Frank and Raimy ever separate. Raimy gets to retain her memories of both timelines, though no one else does. And adult characters, including Frank’s pal Satch (Mekhi Phifer, ER) and co-worker Stan (Anthony Ruivivar, Banshee), are played by the same actors in both time frames, set twenty years apart. (Raimy, being an eight-year-old child in 1996, obviously isn’t List in the past, nor is her pal, Gordo, likely to be Nurse Jackie’s Lenny Jacobson in both.)

This last element is something I’m in favor of in general; twenty years is a long time, but also not super long in the scheme of things, and the looks of two different individuals were likely to be too far apart. The problem with it here is that the CW doesn’t exactly give a huge budget to their shows, so the aging makeup and hair coloring isn’t all that great. It is easy to spot early on that Julie is played by a much younger actress than the character’s 2016 age. Which I guess makes sense, given it would be easier to add years than take them away. But it doesn’t quite look authentic.

What will probably keep me from being a total fan of FREQUENCY is that it does seem to rely a little too heavily on the cop show format, despite the great sci-fi elements, and it has a little bit of cheesy shallowness about it that goes beyond just the makeup issues. But it’s pretty good, and I’m sure it will quickly gain a loyal following.

FREQUENCY premieres Wednesday, October 5 at 9/8c on the CW.