Storming the Castle

Woohoo! It’s the fall TV season premiere week! Now, some of you are wondering, Mike, why are you writing about TV on a blog about reading? My answer is twofold: One) Shut up, it’s my blog and I’ll do as I please. Two) the TV show this post features is about a writer and therefore relevant.

I don’t have much time for TV so I only follow a few shows. I finally got my wife into The Big Bang Theory, so we’ve had fun catching up on the first four seasons of that. Last year I decided to watch the pilot for Person of Interest and was immediately hooked (“Someone with the last name of Nolan is telling a story about an eccentric billionaire crime fighting vigilante? Would it even be possible for this not to be completely awesome?” And yeah, it was pretty much awesome. There’s a reason it was the number one new drama last season). Being a military geek, I also had to tune into the pilot for Last Resort. I would have loved to be at that pitch meeting: “Think Gilligan’s Island meets Crimson Tide”. The pilot was good but I’m curious to see how they go forward from here. Though the money shot for the whole fall TV season might have been in the pilot, where a guy sits at an island tiki bar starring out at the placid lagoon, when suddenly a Trident SLBM breaks the surface, the rocket ignites, and the missile blasts off into space towards its target as the man remarks “Awww, that’s not good.” #understatementoftheyear.

But my favorite show on TV is still ABC’s Castle. For the uninitiated, it follows Richard Castle (Nathan Fillion), a phenomenally successful mystery writer a la James Patterson (who appears in the show on several occasions as himself as one of Castle’s regular poker game players). Bored with his long running series of books, he kills off his main character and struggles to create a new character when he meets the tough yet witty (and since it’s TV, obviously beautiful) Kate Beckett (Stana Katic), an NYPD homicide detective, and decides to follow her around to gather research for his new books. He ultimately creates the character of Nikki Heat, based on her, and writes a series of books based on their adventures, while becoming a vital part of her investigative team. In one of the best marketing ploys I’ve ever seen, the show runners actually publish the books he writes (presumably written by the show’s writers, though it’s the character who is credited as the author). It’s remarkable how much thought is put into these books, which could have easily been cheap, after-thought marketing tie-ins. They really read like they were written by the character, the way he would write them if he were actually a real author. They’re chock full of in-jokes and references to the show (for instance, in Heat Rises a character tells Nikki “she could be a Bond girl”, a reference to Katic’s small part at the end of Quantum of Solace), and you could tell where Castle drew the inspiration for various aspects of the story from the real cases he works with Beckett and her team.

I don’t engage in celebrity worship because they’re always bound to disappoint by running about naked after vacuuming up mountainous drifts of cocaine or some other such nonsense, but it’s nearly impossible to not like Nathan Fillion, both as an actor and as a person. His claim to fame before Castle was the lead role of Captain Malcom Reynolds in Josh Whedon’s ill-fated but beloved sci-fi western Firefly (of which I am also a fan), and Fillion frequently pays homage to the fans of that show, the ones who are largely responsible for his current success. Whether appearing at the Firefly panels every year at Comic-Con (even though Firefly went off the air 10 years ago after a 13 episode run) or the numerous Firefly references on Castle (including the Halloween episode in Season 3 where Castle dressed up as Malcom Reynolds, still the best few minutes of TV ever), Fillion is a gifted actor who seems genuinely grateful to his fans. In fact, this season will reportedly feature an entire Firefly-themed episode where Castle and Beckett investigate an actor who played the captain of a spaceship crew on a cult-hit TV show. And the producers hope for more cast reunions like last season’s episode the reunited Fillion with fellow Firefly alum Adam Baldwin. In fact, if you’re a fellow Browncoat (what die-hard Firefly fans call themselves, a reference to the failed rebellion Reynolds was part of), there’s no reason not to watch Castle. The same witty banter, mix of light-hearted fun, action, and drama, and the awesome ensemble that made Firefly great is on full display here too.

So if you’re not tuning in yet, give it a try. You’ll be glad you did.

Castle airs on ABC Monday night at 10/9C. Richard Castle’s Nikki Heat books are available wherever books are sold, and his Derrick Storm graphic novels are available at select retailers (such as Barnes and Noble) as well.