It's out with the bold, in with the middling new

Days after announcing the cancellation of the brilliant Life on Mars, ABC premieres Castle, dumping an original concept, beautifully achieved, with genius casting, and picking up the most averagely entertaining series in a long time.

Look, it's a business. Time after time the general public - lazy, unimaginative, or operating on a higher level but just plain worn out by the demands of 21st-century living - rejects complicated, stimulating series. God bless the networks for even trying. And God bless ABC for announcing the Mars cancellation early enough so that the show can be satisfyingly wrapped up in April, unlike so many canceled series that leave viewers dangling.

Such grace makes us inclined to forgive the network when it comes up with a Castle, something old, nothing new, everything borrowed, makes me blue. With pretty faces and intriguing cases, it washes over you like warm water, creating a soothing cocoon of banality. The show premieres tomorrow at 10 p.m. on 6ABC.

Handsome Nathan Fillion plays rich novelist and bon vivant Richard Castle. Stana Katic plays the hardworking, repressed police detective. For not-too-terribly contrived reasons, they partner up to solve a different case every week, as the friction of their opposite personalities generates increasing little increments of romantic attachment.

"A control freak like you with something you can't control," the detective's colleague says. "That's going to be more fun than Shark Week."

They really set the bar way up there.

Moonlighting, Remington Steele, and many more moderately successful detective shows with similar sparks-a-poppin' premises litter TV history, and surely ABC has noticed that Bones, which Castle copies considerably, currently pulls in a decent audience no matter where Fox bounces it.

Just to make sure Castle can't miss, the series gives its hero a randy mama with impeccable "graydar" and a champagne diet, and a pretty teenage daughter who is just so much more responsible than her reprobate dad and boozy grandma.

Throw in a weekly mystery, and you have a frothy formula that would make Jessica Fletcher proud, an upscale version of Murder, She Wrote, with a bit more heat.

That show aired for 12 seasons, and the Television Critics Association gave star Angela Lansbury a lifetime achievement award, even if she did work limited hours for the show's last seasons, frequently looping dialogue, as her double appeared on screen with the back of her head to the camera.

Even the pros can be wowed by the pleasantly familiar.