10 TV Shows That Should Have Quit While They Were Ahead
2. Castle
A police procedural with a whodunnit format, Castle centres around a successful crime novelist, Richard Castle, who uses his connections with the New York mayors office to have himself attached to the NYPD homicide unit - and specifically Detective Kate Beckett, in order to research his next series of novels.
The other central premise of the show was the classic will-they-wont-they dynamic, as Beckett and Castle go from antagonistic sniping to a grudging mutual respect to friendship to more. Of course - as shows like Moonlighting and Lois & Clark had found in the past - once the relationship is out in the open the whole thing is on borrowed time.
In Castle's case, that happened much earlier than it probably should, with the pair beginning a relationship between the fourth and fifth seasons. From that point, the narrative was mostly concerned with keeping them together in order to fulfill the procedural remit, while keeping them at a sufficient distance to tease out the romance as long as possible. By Season 8, the lead characters had been married for a year and the show was continuing to alienate many of the people that made it a success by artificially manoeuvring Beckett and Castle away from one another as much as possible still trying to tease out the romance.
This show should have died a death three years ago. Instead, it was finally cancelled in May.