Wednesday, October 28, 2009

I Love the TV Show "Castle"



I have a couple children who live more than a thousand miles away, and I really, really miss them. Both are good friends and I love to visit with them, even when they call during Dancing With the Stars. Luckily for the mother/son tie, both live in later time zones, and I've never had to choose between chatting with them and the newest segment of Castle.

Castle is an hourlong program that is billed as a drama, but it's witty and fun, and a 'can't-miss' for me. I don't watch much TV, but I never miss Castle.

The program is about Rick Castle, a successful mystery writer, who wangles his way into shadowing good-looking homicide detective Kate Beckett as she tries to solve her cases. She keeps telling him to stand back and keep his mout shut, but he's irrepressible and exasperatingly acute, even though the things he comes up with are pretty off-the-wall and quite possibly straight out of his latest plot line.

Nathan Fillion plays Rick Castle and Stana Katic plays Detective Kate Beckett. Both are believable and endearing, he in a sweet, roguish way and she in a strong-but-vulnerable way.

One of my favorite bits was when they went looking for an armed, dangerous susupect. The detectives put on bulletproof vests with POLICE written in large white letters on front and back, and Castle put his on, too. It had WRITER written on it, and when Beckett told him to take it off, he quoted, "If you shoot me, do I not bleed?" Naturally, when she got busy doing police stuff, he put the vest back on, followed them in, fouled everything up, but ended up saving the day after all.

Rick Castle is divorced and single-parents his teenage daughter, Alexis. She's well grounded and very mature for having a flaky actress mother and a will-o-the-wisp, writer father. Oh, and a flaky actress grandmother that lives with them, too. However, where his daughter is concerned, Rick Castle is conservative, protective, and willing to take the heat for an unpopular decision, as when he called Alexis's friend's parents after he had to rescue the two girls from a party where there had been teenage drinking and the friend got very drunk.

Maybe I like this program because I write mysteries, but I think it's more than that. Castle has engaging characters, witty dialogue, great puzzles, and understated sexual tension instead of torrid bedroom scenes showing a lot more than I would care to see.

Try Castle, and let me know what you think. It's on Monday nights on ABC, right after Dancing With the Stars, which turns out to be 10 p.m. here in the Pacific Time Zone. Or, you can watch it on your computer at ABC.com (complete with commercials).

Click here to read ABC's blurb about the show.

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Follow this blog! Coming soon--how to can apples to be used in pies and apple crisp. I learned this from a master canner after I had had umpteen failures. The apples kept swelling and breaking the seal. So, gather your apples and be ready, and I promise it by Sunday.


3 comments:

Valerie Ipson said...

Hmmm, this is the third recommendation of Castle that I've had this week. I'm tempted to tune in, but scared to commit. I haven't watched anything regularly for a long time.

elleskiles said...

i will have to check it out. the part when you wrote about how they had POLICE written in huge letters on their vests is giving me a chuckle as i check this out at 4 o'clock in the morning. thanks.

Kathi Oram Peterson said...

I love Nathan Fillion. I watched him in the series Firefly and fell in love. On the Halloween show of Castle they did a little tribute to Firefly. Awesome! I'm glad I'm not the only one who likes this show.