Stana Katic, known for playing the female lead in ABC’s Castle, returned to murder procedurals in Murder in a Small Town, but it totally flipped her Kate Beckett character. Katic played Kate Beckett opposite Nathan Fillion’s Richard Castle on the popular procedural series for eight years, forging a household name for herself as an NYPD detective. Despite being one of the best dramedy series of its time, Castle ended after eight seasons, with Nathan Fillion going on to play John Nolan in ABC’s The Rookie and Katic joining another crime series.
Katic’s stint as Kate Beckett halted when ABC unceremoniously ended the crime drama in 2016. The network canceled the show because of declining ratings. However, ABC had already fired Katic from the show, and the series announced that it would continue without her, killing Katic’s Kate character and making Richard Castle, who married Kate in Castle season 7, a widower. Now, seven years after Castle ended, Katic returns to the genre on network TV in Fox’s new procedural thriller. Her character will officially subvert expectations of the actor following her Castle stint.
Stana Katic Returns To The Police Procedural Genre With Murder In A Small Town
Katic Makes Her Police Procedural Return After Castle’s 2016 End
In October 2024, Katic returned to the genre in Fox’s psychological crime drama Murder in a Small Town, which stars Trench 11’s Rossif Sutherland and Reacher‘s Kristin Kreuk. The series follows Sutherland’s Chief of Police, Karl Alberg, who moves to a small coastal town to escape big-city police work, but soon discovers that the small town has plenty of mysteries to solve. In the series’ first three episodes, Murder in a Small Town introduced a murder case along with a small handful of suspects and followed Alberg as he dug deeper into the people involved and their motivations.
| Stana Katic’s Recent TV Series | Character | Year |
|---|---|---|
| Castle | Kate Beckett | 2009-2016 |
| Absentia | Emily Byrne | 2017-2020 |
| Murder in a Small Town | Zoe Strachan | 2024 |
Murder in a Small Town is the actor’s second time returning to the police procedural genre since Stana Katic exited Castle, but it marks her return to network TV. Katic starred in Absentia, an Amazon series similarly positioned in the thrill and drama genres after Castle ended in 2016. In it, Katic plays an FBI agent who reappears after being declared dead and is the prime suspect in a string of murders. Absentia was a mix of Katic’s Castle and Murder in a Small Town roles, wherein she is a murder suspect but someone with previous ties to an agency.
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