XENITH

When not plundering the literary canon for potential screen gold, screenwriters are often concerned with rendering the author’s lot on screen. Three broad myths typically result: the tortured, tragic artist with furrowed brow and repetitive strain injury of the fingers (or wrists, an occupational hazard of all that navel-gazing), the bitter, suicidal drunk, or writer-as-rebel-cum-rock-star, perpetuated by anything vaguely related to Hunter S. Thompson or Jack Kerouac. So too US crime romp Castle.

All of the above inflate the sizable bubble of writerly vanity; heaven forbid readers, you poor, mediocre plebs not gifted by the muses, should run away with the idea that writers of those airport paperbacks and indeed, the literary titans of this world are much like you.

TV-land frequently indulges in this sort of wish fulfilment; recasting it’s often overlooked and beleaguered creatives as youthful, glamorous and dynamic.  True to form, Nathan Fillion (Firefly, Waitress, Desperate Housewives) acquits himself well as the titular Richard Castle. After all, this is a man who makes a flinty space-age outlaw named Malcom sexy. 

Fillion slides archly through the pilot on a slime of dubious hell-raiser charm and blue-eyed handsomeness as the titular crime novelist, who finds himself caught up in a real murder investigation. But, before we get to the gore, the series takes a moment to establish the difficulties of being a best-selling author. Not least of which is chronic boredom, what with the endless hobnobbing with the great and the good at glitzy parties, and having to bat away palpitating young murder groupies.

The resultant unsavoury train of thought on Dan Brown et al and their nocturnal habits requires me to conjure the, ahem, arresting image of Castle’s procession through the streets of New York on a liberated police horse a la Lady Godiva, one of many debauched stories alluded to.  It also begs the question, how on earth do these people find time to actually write?

Castle begins the series failing to tackle this particular problem, having killed off a beloved character, in denial and in search of inspiration. He finds it in the shape of a comely, if gruff police detective, investigating a series of copycat killings. Cut from the same maverick cloth as many a modern TV crime fighter, but with one important difference: Richard Castle is all shiny surface, with nary a smudge of the soul to be found. Instead, Castle flirts with the gamine Detective Beckett (Stana Katic, Quantum of Solace, Heroes) and has himself a grand adventure.

She looks doe-eyed and delicate, but underestimate her at your peril. Beckett’s one of the boys, kicking down doors and taking down perps. There’s a decided whiff of Significant Backstory, about her too, during one of Castle’s many smooth, showboating sequences. As ‘smart, attractive women become lawyers’ not cops, Castle aims his sub-Holmesian slings and arrows at Beckett when the come-hither looks fail. Even if he can’t grasp the chasm between reality and fiction at crime scenes, when it comes to Kate Beckett, Castle hits home almost at once. 

Ah, another one of my favourite cop clichés, in which the damaged woman in a man’s world covers her pain with a tough exterior. Helen Mirren as Jane Tennison remains the best example; she made the archetype smart, complex, if frequently unlikeable – no such luck here. The implication is that Beckett’s a mere kill-joy who needs a  man-child with a no-means-yes approach to gender politics to shake her up a little. One finds more facets to the principal characters in an advert for cleaning products.

That said, Castle refuses to take itself seriously. Instead, leading the viewer by the nose toward a dramatic emotional connection before the punch line, giving said nose a gleeful ‘gotcha’ tweak. Like the majority of scenes in which Castle appears with his vastly more sensible teenage daughter and showbiz mother. If you smell another cliché here, you’d be right – his daughter is wise beyond her years, her sole function being to roll her eyes at the grown-ups’ childish antics, and to prompt one of those squinty, staring-into-the-middle distance eureka moments.

Castle aims some neat jabs at the commercial end of the publishing industry and the nuts-and-bolts formula approach favoured by certain thriller writers; I greatly enjoyed the hideously awkward cameos from real-life authors like James Patterson, and TV screenplay veteran Stephen J. Cannell (currently re-booting the A-Team for the summer). Name-checking aside, we know they’re writers because they say writerly things like ‘self-aggrandising’. But, in essentials, a zippy chimera of Murder, She Wrote, CSI: NY and Moonlighting, with fun dialogue, set in a gleaming tourist-board New York never darkened by rainclouds. Now that The Mentalist’s writers have given their characters a welcome, bloody kick in the teeth, Castle is enjoyable enough to paper over its familiarity.

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