The CW Announces Lead Actresses for New Genre Pilots
As pilot season begins in earnest, the CW has announced casting for leads in two of their six new pilots, which you can read about here.
Peyton List is to star in the show Frequency, based on Toby Emmerich’s sci-fi movie of the same name. In that version Jim Caviezel as a homicide detective who is able to make contact with his late father 30 years in the past.
This version will have List playing Raimy Sullivan, a police detective in 2016 who finds out she is able to speak to her father, Peyton Sullivan, 20 years in the past in 1996 through a ham radio. They work together on an unsolved murder case. She is able to repair her strained relationship with her estranged father (played by Riley Smith), but at the possible cost of changing the future. The TV series will be written by Supernatural showrunner Jeremy Carver.
List – not the Disney ingenue – has a history with the CW, having played Cara Coburn on The Tomorrow People and Lisa Snart/Golden Glider on The Flash.
Laura Brent is to star in the show Transylvania, written and produced by Hugh Sterbakow and directed by Jason Ensler. Transylvania takes Laura Brent’s character Victoria on a search for her missing father in 1880, traveling from New York City to Transylvania, where she meets a wrongfully disgraced detective from Scotland Yard. They team up to investigate and discover the origins of the most famous monsters history has ever known.
The Australian actress is perhaps best known to US audiences for her performance as Liliandil in The Chronicles of Narnia: Voyage of the Dawn Treader.
Both pilots are period sci-fi pieces, each with its own flair. Transylvania will be dealing with ancient but recognizable monsters, while Frequency deals with the effects of limited time travel. Both shows appear to have potential and hopefully will become entertaining paranormal fiction series with great and memorable female leads. Let’s hope we can continue to get more and more female led sci-fi.
