I started with a fast forward through Dancing with the Stars in order to get to the important stuff – there wasn’t much. Usually there’s a great Macy’s Stars of Dance number but all we got was Shakira shaking her groove thing. The pros did demo the Argentine Tango and Paso Doble, which the celebs will be taking on next week. It was good but it didn’t excite me. In the end MMA fighter Chuck Liddell was sent home. Aaron Carter barely escaped elimination and I don’t get that. The kid has a lot of work to do but there are others who are worse. Somehow Melissa Joan Hart ended up on top. She’s fun but not that great. Mya, Natalie Coughlin and Joanna Krupa are the best all around performers and it could be an all female finale this year.

Next was Castle from Monday night. The story opened with a group of school children watching a webcam report from the North Pole. But that’s no polar bear poking around the tent, it’s a human, with a gun. Blam – explorer guy is blown away, mercifully without a lot of blood and gore. Castle and Beckett figure out that the guy was a scam artist who was broadcasting from his New York apartment. But what kind of con man takes 50,000 from the mark (in this case, the parents of the school kids) and then sticks around to play the part? Clever story with some fun twists and turns and I never saw the killer coming.

I also really enjoyed the side plot with Castle and his daughter and the sexy, new violin teacher. The father/daughter relationship on this show is so wonderfully normal, in a weird, and wacky way. But that’s the show in a nutshell.

Shifting to the dysfunctional family dynamic — I watched the season finale of Durham County and I was shouting at the TV all the way through. This show is seriously twisted and it hooks me week after week. In the finale, everyone believes that detective Mike murdered his mistress, and no wonder considering all the secrets he’s been keeping.  So who does his wife run to for comfort? Ray, the actual murderer! Then he caught Mike’s daughter sneaking around in his house, took her to “the farm” and things got really creepy from there on in. What I love about this show is that even the good guys are bad guys on some level. Everyone has a secret adn that’s why it’s so hard to figure out who is telling the truth.

Great show and I’m looking forward to a second season which is coming to ION in January.

Photos:

Dancing With the Stars: (ABC/ADAM LARKEY) TOM BERGERON, SAMANTHA HARRIS, ANNA TREBUNSKAYA, CHUCK LIDDELL

Castle: (ABC/KAREN NEAL) JON HUERTAS, NATHAN FILLION, STANA KATIC, DAVID RAMSEY

The leap is in the subject matter and the style of the series, a sort of suburban Twin Peaks with a touch of Hitchcock. Let me be clear here that this show is not for everyone. One reviewer even said watching it made him uncomfortable and I’d agree. It makes you feel like a perverted voyeur and that’s something we don’t often see on network TV.

The show stars Flashpoint’s Hugh Dillon as Mike Sweeney, a homicide detective from Toronto who is looking to start over after his partner was gunned down and his wife nearly died of breast cancer. He moves his family to suburban Durham County but instead of Astroturf lawns and block parties, he gets a forest of electrical towers and a neighbor who might be a serial killer.

Justin Louis, who play neighbor Ray Prager, has been a staple on Canadian TV since the late 80’s. He’s currently working on Stargate Universe, but has also been a regular on 1-800-Missing and The Fighting Fitzgeralds. Louis is a great foil for Dillion’s Sweeney. He seems like a regular, working class Joe, but that’s just a mask to hide his true, demented personality.

And speaking of masks, one of the most disconcerting things about the show is actually one of the most innocent. Sweeney’s youngest daughter likes to wear one of those full anime heads that the cosplay kids wear. It has the huge eyes and the head is out of proportion to her body and it is creepy. At one point in the pilot, she meets a friend who is also wearing an anime puppet head and I have to think this is all in her imagination. The two of them sitting together talking about murder is very bizarre!

The most unusual element of the series is the Hitchcockian way it deals with the violence and there’s plenty. Where most crime shows have no problem showing a murder on screen, Durham County hides it by showing it through the eyes of Prager who is hidden in the woods. We see what he sees, snatches of two teen girls having a flirty picnic with an older man. Flirty turns to kinky, and kinky leads to rape and murder. Though you only see snippets through the trees, it’s truly horrifying maybe even moreso because Prager allows it to happen. What happens later, though, is one of the most disturbing things I’ve seen on TV in a long time. And it’s funny, after a summer of watching people be eviscerated, snapped in two and burned alive on Harper’s Island, I didn’t think there was anything left that could give me the shivers but Durham County did just that.

If your taste in horror runs is more psychological thriller and less psycho slasher, watch Durham County on ION. They’ll be rerunning the pilot episode numerous times this week with new episodes running every Monday at 10:00 for eleven more weeks.

Photos: ION Television

L-R: Mike Sweeney (HUGH DILLON) and Ray Prager (JUSTIN LOUIS)

Ray Prager (JUSTIN LOUIS) and wife Traci (SONYA SALOMA) recline in chair