Nathan Fillion Makes ABC's "Castle" a Comfy Place to Visit

If you're a Joss Whedon fan -- and all quality TV enthusiasts should be -- you're already sold on Nathan Fillion's roguish charms, thanks to his starring roles as the space cowboy in Firefly and the hammy hero in Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog. In ABC's Castle, anyone who watches should be equally enthusiastic.

Nathan Fillion, in this role no less than his others, is a natural-born TV star...

He's got the easy manner of a Bruce Willis or a James Garner, with the same gift for playful comedy and arrested adolescence. In Castle, he plays a bestselling mystery author, Rick Castle, who's teamed temporarily - then more permanently -- with a beautiful, tightly wound NYPD detective named Kate Beckett, played by Stana Katic.

The dynamic is a little similar to that of detectives Charlie Crews and Dani Reese on NBC's Life, but not as sharp. Castle creator Andrew W. Marlowe stacks the deck with his odd couple, so that Castle -- at least at the start -- is always right, and Beckett is exasperated but intrigued. Making them more equal would have made the chemistry stronger (and the show better), but Fillion is more than up to carrying most of the load.

"He is like a nine-year-old on a sugar rush," Beckett complains of the womanizing, quick-thinking author. But she's stuck with him anyway, when a series of murders point to someone who's copying the crime scenes in his novels. He's horrified of that -- but he plays poker with a bunch of fellow novelists, and he's a little thrilled to brag to them about it, too.

"In my world," Castle tells her, "that's the red badge of honor. That's the criminal Cooperstown!"

And in the pilot, there's an extra kick: the authors around his poker table, playing themselves, include James Patterson and Stephen J. Cannell. Cannell, in his TV days, wrote The Rockford Files, and he'd be a natural to write for, as well as appear on, Castle.

Castle's just his type of character -- and Nathan Fillion, like James Garner, is just his type of actor.

And, by the way, Castle could USE some sharper writing, to match the sparkle of its leading man.