ABC’s ‘Castle’ season 8: Progress and ‘True Detective’ humor

Going into “Castle” season 8, there are challenges in multiple forms. For one, we start with what we feel is a simple-but-important question: How do you make this show feel familiar, and yet at the same time different? You have a contingent of fans who love this show for what it is: Weekly investigations with humor, flirty moments between Castle and Beckett, and probably a moment somewhere in there where they are interrupted in the middle of something romantic with a call for a case. Occasionally, you also have backstory, introductions to recurring characters, and a moment or two in which you may cry.

All of these elements still should be there in season 8. They are the fabric of the show. How do you make them different? That is where the challenge lies, since making the same exact show every week has to be taxing from a creative point of view, and with Terence Paul Winter and Alexi Hawley now on board as showrunners, they may have their own vision, their own desire to be different and to make these characters shine. They will have a chance to do so come the show’s premiere on Monday, September 21.

For now, there is time to make veiled references to “True Detective” season 2. See Hawley’s tweet below. We expect changes to “Castle,” but one thing we don’t expect is for it to suddenly become more confusing than the premiere episode of Colin Farrell’s new HBO series. It took us a good fifteen minutes to start to understand what is going on there.

If we were a predicting man, we would assume that at least one of the major characters introduced this season will be in one of the first scripts. It may also be a given, since how else would the media know about the parts? Also, anticipation is high for some sort of decision on Beckett in regards to her future. There is no real motivation to hold back a decision there. You want to reveal her choice, and then jaunt forward in that direction to the aftermath. Whether she be a Captain, a politician, or Castle’s partner, any of these could fundamentally shift the series … but hopefully still keeping some of those core elements intact.

As we find out more updates about “Castle” we will share them at the link here; this will be a chance to see if some of our hunches are correct.

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