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OK, so when Channel 5 started showing the first season of US crime drama Castle on Friday, it wasn’t exactly as ‘new’ as they might have wanted us to think. Earlier this year, ABC renewed Castle for a fourth season, and Sky channel Alibi is well under way with Season 3. Channel 5 is, therefore, a little behind, but hey ho, better late than never!
The opening episode, ‘Flowers for Your Grave,’ introduced sarcastic, womanising crime-writer Richard Castle (Firefly’s Nathan Fillion – a reason to tune in by itself). He was enlisted by NYPD Detective Kate Beckett (Stana Katic) to assist with a case involving a series of murders that mirrored those in his books…
In recent weeks, I have become increasingly bored with watching and writing about crime dramas because, generally, they’ve all been much of a muchness. However, while Castle wasn’t startlingly original, it had something that made it all the more entertaining and watchable than recent efforts: fun. A lot of said fun, of course, comes from Nathan Fillion. If not for him, it would be hard to imagine Castle having achieved the success it has. For a start, the character of Castle could have so easily been unlikeable, but Fillion is just so charismatic and good humoured that it never even crosses your mind to do anything but like him.
That’s not to say that he’s the only reason Castle is worth watching; it has so much more going for it than that, not least Katic, who is excellent as Beckett. She brings warmth and humanity to the so-often one-dimensional steely female cop role, and the scene in which Castle carried out a psycho-analysis of her was genuinely affecting – I never realised it was possible to convey so much bottled-up emotion from using only your eyes and your Adam’s apple. She and Fillion also have brilliant chemistry, bouncing off each other like they’ve just eaten four tubes of Smarties each, and the obligatory ‘will they?/ won’t they?’ relationship is actually one of the most interesting that I have seen for some time.
Furthermore, the knowing script, which regularly featured characters directly addressing crime genre conventions, was, again, tremendous fun. If the first two Scream films had played on the crime genre, then they would probably have been something like this, with the characters’ anticipations for a twist providing the most amusement.
The trouble with the majority of modern crime dramas is that they fail to spot how ridiculous they are. This is not a trouble shared by Castle; instead, what makes it so refreshing is that it isn’t aiming to be taken seriously or to be hard hitting, or even to make you think too hard (the character committing the murders wasn’t even mentioned until 15 minutes from the end, we then met him 2 minutes later and were told he was the murderer 2 minutes after that). What Castle does do is aim to entertain, and I would be lying if I said I wouldn’t quite happily sit and watch back-to-back episodes; trust me, 40 minutes passes before you can say Serenity. Therefore, while Channel 5 may have been a little slow off the mark, it has definitely been worth the wait.
The next episode of Castle is on Friday 9pm Channel 5.
I am such a huge fan of Castle and am so glad that a terrestrial/freeview channel has bought it. It deserves a big mainstream audience here!
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