Murder, He Wrote
Castle (9.30pm Sunday nights on Channel Seven), continues the time-honoured tradition of the author as a murder investigator. Like Jessica Fletcher in Murder, She Wrote, Rick Castle is a successful murder-mystery author with writer’s block, who finds inspiration for a new heroine, and grisly murders, when he gets himself attached to a homicide detective and ends up helping to solve the cases.
Slick, light and breezy, like its fictional author, Castle is a polished and fast-paced easy-murder-mystery watch that doesn’t get to the top of the genre, but doesn’t bottom out either. Beautifully lit and shot, the show is a Hollywood version of police work and the literary world; book launches are glamorous, full of celebrities and bear no relation to reality, and Rick even has a regular card game with successful authors like Stephen J. Cannell and James Patterson. (If the show were made in Australia, he’d be playing cards with Bryce Courtenay and Matthew Reilly, while Tim Winton rolls spliffs and dreams of going surfing.) The police station is unlike any real station either, it’s so shiny, new and full of good-looking, well-dressed detectives.
Nathan Fillion, who previously played Captain Mal Reynolds in Joss Whedon’s brilliant, but short-lived, sci-fi cowboy series Firefly, oozes charm from every pore of his good-looking body and uses his celebrity for good, not evil. Rick is an engaging know-it-all author, who charms all before him, cuts through red tape for the homicide detectives (he has the mayor’s number on speed dial), gets into all manner of dangerous situations and emerges with barely a ruffled hair on his handsome head. Rick Castle could be an unbearable pain, but Fillion’s enjoyable performance makes it appear that there is more than just surface to the successful author. He lives in an expensive, stylish apartment with a goody two-shoes daughter and his hard-drinking ex-Broadway star mother, who appear to be the light-relief squad.
Detective Kate Beckett, Rick’s inspirational detective, is played by the almost-as-beautiful Stana Katic, who should be investigated by internal affairs so that it can be established where she gets the money for her expensive outfits. By episode five, we have discovered her mother was the victim of an unsolved murder, the reason for someone so intelligent and attractive becoming a homicide detective, which has kicked in an over-arching storyline that has Rick trying to solve the murder himself.
Castle is not breaking any new ground in the detective genre, but it has the occasional witty one-liner and keeps everything light, even resorting to the ‘Boing!’ timpani sound effect and zooming camera on a punchline. The relief for this viewer was to have, not the heavy-handed seriousness of the CSI franchise, but a good dose of sexual tension between the leads, and a main character who is described as a ‘nine year old on a sugar rush who doesn’t take anything seriously’; neither did I.
This piece originally appeared in ‘The Big Issue’.
Matt Quartermaine is a Melbourne-based writer and comedian. With Matt Parkinson, Tim Smith and Andrew Goodone, he produces ‘The Chat’, a weekly podcast in which four grown men in comfortable chairs spill their guts. Click here to download it for free at iTunes.
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