Maybe it was inevitable. All shows go through peaks and troughs. It’s undeniably hard to sustain a formula for season after season without things getting stale or shaking them up in some pretty big ways every once in a while. I’m actually a big fan of directional shifts in TV shows as long as the heart of the beast remains the same. But when you stray too far, when a show has changed so much from what it initially set out to be that I feel fundamentally different when I watch it, is it even the same show anymore? Or is it some new animal wearing the skin of my former friend like a coat, a twisted doppelganger...
It was 2009, and like every Freshman in college that year, I’d just discovered Hulu. I lived on a small floor and didn’t do many extracurriculars, so I didn’t know anyone. Mostly I just sat in my room and worked on my TV education. Death Note went by in six days. I held my breath for new Fringe each week (remember season 1 of Fringe? Oh man). I was a kid in a candy store.
One day Hulu dropped the usual Geico ads and started showing me clips from this upcoming police drama. I scoffed at first, but then I noticed Nathan Fillion. Coming off of watching three times through of Firefly the previous summer, I smiled at the quick dialog (even if it was a little cheesy). I was reminded of reading Agatha Christie novels with my dad in grade school and how much I missed those little mysteries. CSI, Law & Order, and other typical procedurals had always fallen flat for me as everyone was so serious all the time. So melodramatic. I figured any police show that was going to have a confession at the end of every episode might as well embrace the fact that it wasn’t based anywhere close to reality, and this show was selling itself with a handsome millionaire playboy, the unbearably confident-through-his-stubble Nathan Fillion sitting in an interrogation room and giving this hardboiled female detective trope standing over him the most aggravating time of her life… something about it clicked for me. I’d watch that pilot.
It was exactly what I’d hoped for. Of the four or five guest characters introduced in the pilot, it was pretty easy to pin down who the bad guy would be. You just had to count the remaining commercial breaks, decide what the most interesting twist would be for each one, and remove people from the pool accordingly. The dialog was snappy - everyone was a total sass-factory. The jokes flowed just as the murder unraveled in such a pleasingly predictable way. I was hooked on this stereotypically oddball partnership. It was the best mediocre cop show I’d ever seen.
The more I thought about the show, the more it impressed me. Beyond nailing the quip-to-quip comedy and the mediocre mystery-of-the-week done exactly right, Castle’s family structure was something I hadn’t seen before. A single father living with his daughter and his mother, but both his ex-wives potentially in the picture as guest stars. An odd little family unit. Something different. Maybe a little more reflective of this modern day where more and more of my friends were growing up with step dads and foster families. It’s not like TV had been stuck in the perfect nuclear family of the 50s since, uh, the 50s, but it had felt a little like we’d gotten stuck in the perfectly dysfunctional family of The Simpsons. Castle’s home life was so completely off the reservation, and I liked that, even if Alexis has almost always been an uninteresting Mary Sue.
I also realized that Castle the show was going to operate on another level I hadn’t appreciated just yet: class commentary. At the still early stages of the financial crisis, this show came along and delivered episode after episode of scathing commentary on the way the rich lived. Castle was loveable, but there was no denying how irresponsible he was. The show may not have played that up much (because without a likeable Richard Castle it was doomed to failure), but victim after victim was some rich bastard killed for being greedy or because the rich people around him or her were jealous. If the victim wasn’t doomed by their surroundings or inherent nature, the show still found a way to get its digs in. I remember the second episode of season 1 like it was yesterday (also get off my lawn). This was the one that really hooked me, because in addition to a compact little murder with a great key to solving it at the end, it managed to throw this whole subplot in with a wealthy married couple that appeared on the surface to be so happy but underneath were rotten to the core, backstabbing each other at every turn on their race to divorce court. Seriously, if you’ve never seen this show (or even if you have), go find season 1 episode 2 on Netflix and just bask in the glory of perfectly executed pulp entertainment.
The end of that episode introduced the other thing that would go on to make Castle so great: an abrupt change from zingers flying around the police station to a shockingly effective dramatic moment where Beckett gets to talk their murderer down from suicide. The tension of this scene put me on the edge of my seat all the way through the inevitable success of our hero. Even though there’s only one way for a scene like that to end on a mainstream TV show, I admired the writers’ dedication to showing a really tense, completely screwed up, violent moment on an otherwise lighthearted show. It was a scene that for me really got to the fact that murder is not just action sequences, investigations, zingers, and “if it weren’t for you meddling kids”. Murder is a scary thing committed by seriously messed up people, and it’s absolutely harrowing for the friends and family of the victim. This how seemed to know that somewhere in the back of its head.
Season 1 maintained this level of quality in my eyes. The class commentary continued as we got several episodes at the poverty end of the spectrum, often involving how those at the top and bottom ended up with their lives intertwined. Sure, the show’s perspective was always hopelessly from the top, but this is a show about a millionaire playboy mystery writer. I never expected miracles. And speaking of which, it remained so much fun to watch this good-hearted but absolute jackass protagonist grind the gears of Beckett week in and week out, and even more fun to watch how capable she was of turning the tables on him. The dynamic between Beckett and Castle was arguably the best part of the show, and it made for the meat of the show’s constant quips. The backup cast developed well, too, with everyone getting good lines and Ryan and Esposito thankfully not blending together when it would’ve been so easy to let them.
In other words, a friggin great first season.
So what happened? As the years went on, Castle has drifted. It started subtly, when a specific kind of “niche community” episode emerged. These started out fun - a fashion world episode, a vampire/werewolf cosplayers halloween episode, a SNM episodes - and holiday themed episodes aside, they stayed true to the class commentary of season 1. But somewhere along the line, they got increasingly lavish - the steampunk episode and the spy-games episodes both come to mind - and the spectacle of the thing seemed to take over the commentary. Even this is somewhat forgivable, because while the show was slowly losing its interesting commentary, much of that was in the name of entertaining premises. Some of the most outlandish episodes were also some of its best.
The first major strike for me was somewhere along the line when I noticed that it had been months since Castle had acted like a spoiled little kid. I suppose he was going to have to grow up eventually, but that transformation is something I was waiting with baited breath to see on screen. Instead, the brash, flirtatious, obnoxious playboy from season 1 just sort of gradually turned into someone’s goofy dad after a few seasons, and no one seemed to have stopped and taken the time to notice. Castle - both the show and the dude - had lost their fangs.
Meanwhile, the show also started to go to further and further lengths for capital D Drama. Plotlines like Beckett’s various love interests making Castle have all them feels were all well and good, getting played for both humorous acts of jealousy as well as real soul-searching for the show’s titular character. At the same time, there was apparently a “one overly-dramatic two parter per season” policy instituted upon the series renewal. While switching gears for a few scenes had made the show special, these really got into hardcore “save the comedy for two weeks from now” episodes that were a drag to get through. And since each one had to up the stakes from the one before, they slowly got more and more preposterous as first FBI, then CIA, and then mysterious people in suits above even them got involved in our funny little NYC bureau. Then there were the season finales: always so much with the feels. Drama slowly crept into the show, and as the D went up, the funnies had to be shuffled aside to make room. Slowly but surely, the reason I came back every week gave way to boring, convoluted melodrama.
Then there was the season 4 finale and Captain Montgomery’s death. In what I thought was actually a well done character death and dramatic moment (even if I was over the “my mother was murdered by mysterious evil folks” trope a decade ago), they went and brought in Gates. As I said at the top, I think shaking things up is a good and necessary thing to do to a show that’s been on the air for 4 years already. But Gates was always just harshin my mellow, man. Where Montgomery had always been in for a laugh, Gates was a buzzkill. Aside from a couple memorable and hilarious comedic plotlines with her, she was always there right in time to make things difficult for our heroes instead of adding an extra flavor of fun like Montgomery had. I wasn’t attached to that flavor in particular - by all means, shake it up, bring in someone new. But with the show already slipping away from its comedy, this was a big step in the wrong direction.
I don’t know what to say about season 5 other than it just felt bland. It wasn’t the happy couple finally getting together; there were plenty of fine plotlines there, and if it hadn’t happened I would’ve faulted them for dragging that whole thing on for far too long. Maybe it was just complacent writers or the fact that the same formula week in and week out can only go for so many years before it starts to just get samey. Season 5 was a blur.
Which brings us to this week, and the premiere of season 6. I had high hopes after the opening scene took what had been such a serious, downer finale and turned it into a cute and giggly bit. But instead of getting things back to normal, things have just gone full serious mode, guys. And as far as I can tell, there’s no going back. This premiere was clearly full of new regular cast members - this CIA thing isn’t going anywhere - but none of them were any fun. There’s not even a goofy tech guy! Come on, guys. There’s always a goofy tech guy. But no, we’ve just got serious partner, serious boss, completely bland and also serious black dude, and a few other serious people walking around in the background. I guess their tech guy was kinda pudgy, but he wasn’t goofy. He was a little nervous but also, say it with me now, kinda serious.
But wait! Maybe Castle can come in and liven things up, and there’s always Ryan and Esposito. Maybe even Lanie. Except with Beckett in a new location entirely, we’re left shoehorning the old precinct into the plot through some gimmick or another. And then the episode ends, and unlike a normal Castle season premiere, we don’t get back to normal. We just get more Drama.
Is this how it’s going to be now? Serious people working on Serious cases? Elaborate excuses to get in every one of our extravagantly large cast?
In the end, this season premiere made me feel just like Alexis’s new stupid boyfriend: annoyed, old, worn-down, and like I’ve seen this movie before. Or maybe I just saw the first half before walking out.
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