In baseball parlance, going two-for-two is an enviable statistic. It means you made two plate appearances against a pitcher, swung the bat and got on base twice. In television, going two-for-two is almost unheard of.
And yet it’s happened for Poppy Montgomery. The blonde actress from Sydney, Australia, spent seven years playing FBI agent Samantha Spade on Without a Trace, from 2002 to 2009.
The Golden Globe winner followed Spade and her fellow agents — headed by Jack Malone (Anthony LaPaglia) — as they hunted down missing persons in New York City.
To have one successful series on North American television is like smashing a home run. To do it twice is like hitting for the cycle (a single, double, triple and round-tripper).
That’s where the actress born Poppy Petal Ema Elizabeth Deveraux Donahue finds herself, thanks to Unforgettable. CBS’s steady forensic drama, which nets between 10 and 14 million U.S. viewers per week, traces former Syracuse, N.Y., detective Carrie Wells (Montgomery) as she helps solve crimes for the NYPD homicide squad based in Queens.
Carrie has a unique gift that gives her a leg up during investigations: a rare medical condition causes her to have perfect memory. Every conversation, every crime scene, every emotional moment — good or bad — is stored in Carrie’s mind, available for her to dissect and glean evidence from.
Has the veteran actress picked up any of the skills her television character has?
“No, God no!” she laughs over the phone during a recent chat with TV Guide Canada. “I’m good with lines on-set because I’ve done it for so long, so I can glance at a scene and kind of know it, but I don’t remember what I had for breakfast. I have way too much on my mind right now.”
Montgomery says she always planned to return to series television, spending her down time after Without a Trace to raise her son and star in TV movies, most notably portraying Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling in Lifetime’s Magic Beyond Words: The J.K. Rowling Story. When the script for Unforgettable came across her desk, she jumped in with both feet.
“I loved the script and I loved the role as well. Niels (Arden Oplev), who had directed the European version of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, was directing the pilot and I really wanted to work with him,” Montgomery recalls. “There were a lot of elements that were really appealing to me.”
That included Carrie’s gift as the unique twist on the procedural formula. Montgomery reveals she read The Woman Who Can’t Forget written by Jill Price, the real-life woman on whom the series is loosely based.
Through freeze-frames, dream-like segments and CGI-enhanced scenes, Carrie walks around as the background halts and remembers minute details such as an askew painting that was straight before and a note tucked under a paperweight; the details others barely notice become important pieces in growing murder investigations.
Of course, it isn’t all about Carrie and her memory. Detective Al Burns is Carrie’s unofficial boss and one-time boyfriend. They’ve shared plenty of sultry glances over dead bodies and brain-numbing paperwork, with Carrie recalling every time they’ve rolled in the hay. It’s obvious Al will stray from his girlfriend, Elaine (Annie Parisse), at some point, though Montgomery believes producers won’t go there any time soon.
“They have to stretch that out for as long as possible,” she explains. “It’s like Rachel and Ross on Friends, or Moonlighting. You have to keep them apart, and everyone is rooting for them to get together. I would like to see them get together. I think they’re great, similar to Jack and Samantha on Without a Trace. Everyone was hoping that they would end up together.”
In the meantime, more adventures await the homicide squad, including a recurring character played by Jane Curtin. The former Saturday Night Live and Kate & Allie star appears in Tuesday’s “Carrie’s Caller.”
Curtin portrays Jane Webster, a medical examiner who has been demoted to the Queens police department after mouthing off to her bosses. Carrie turns to Jane when a serial killer who knows about Carrie’s ability taunts the officers as his list of victims grow.
“There’s a lot of crazy adventure, more romance between Carrie and Al,” Montgomery teases about future episodes. “A lot of good stuff, and Carrie is always breaking the rules and putting herself in danger and making Al crazy.”
Sounds like another home run to us.
Unforgettable airs Tuesdays at 10 p.m. ET on CTV/CBS.
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