Canceled ABC Show Moves to New Channel

It’s been more than five years since ABC canceled Castle, but luckily fans still have ways to enjoy it on their TVs. The show has since lived on via syndication on TNT and local broadcast stations around the nation. Now, it has a whole new home for its reruns to air, giving fans a chance to relive the show’s charming mysteries from the beginning. According to Deadline, Lifetime has picked up the rights to Castle. While it wasn’t clear if all of the ABC dramedy was optioned, the show ran for eight seasons, totaling 173 episodes. Even if the whole series wasn’t picked up, that’s a healthy dose of content for Lifetime’s schedule.

Castle will start airing on the network on Tuesdays at 2 p.m. ET, starting on Oct. 5. However, the show will temporarily move off the schedule as Lifetime begins its “It’s a Wonderful Lifetime” campaign, which is its holiday movie cycle. Castle will then return to that Tuesday slot in January. The show joins other notable crime shows airing on the network such as Rizzoli & Isles, The Closer and Major Crimes

Castle garnered a big following during its run, which lasted from March 9, 2009, to May 16, 2016. Nathan Fillion played Richard Castle, a mystery writer whose novels are being used as a serial killer’s inspiration. He teams up with Kate Beckett, a homicide detective whom Stana Katic portrays. Other cast members include Jon Huertas as Detective Javi Esposito, Seamus Dever as Detective Kevin Ryan, and Tamala Jones as Dr. Lanie Parish.

This syndication deal — as well as Hulu’s recent streaming acquisition of the series — means good news for the fans of the series wanting to watch the show easily. It’s been a glum few years for the Castle fandom, being as the show notoriously ended in chaotic fashion behind the scenes with no revival hopes surfacing. After Season 8 aired, producers fired Katic, despite her being one of the show’s two leads. The move was reportedly done to shrink the budget and get Castle Season 9 greenlit. However, the show was still canceled, meaning the public firing blunder was for nothing.

In 2018, Katic told Entertainment Weekly, “I’m actually still not clear on the thought process behind the way that it went down. It hurt and it was a harsh ending, but now, nearly two years later…I met so many beautiful people on that project, and we collaborated on something really unique in that it’s not every day that you get a show, or a series, that has eight seasons and that it was a hit for the network. It would be a disservice to those people, to the work that we did together, and to my work, which I feel contributed, in part, to the success of the show, to be anything but grateful because, at the end of the day, that was a fantastic platform. It was a formative experience, and we told a love story that I feel moved people, touched people, and I can’t be anything but glad that I was a part of something like that. I hope it remains something special in viewers’ minds forever.”

In a 2020 interview with the Daily Telegraph, Katic, who noted she was still “hurt” and “confused” over the ousting, added, “Time has passed and I am so thankful to have been a part of that project [and] for it to have affected as many people as it did. People loved [Kate and Nathan Fillion’s Rick as a] couple and loved the story we told, loved all of those characters.”