The family wanted to watch Castle series, and I watched along. Immediately some similarities to the famous Poirot series became clear.
Season 1 episode 1, Flowers for Your Grave, is a remake of ABC Murders.
Season 1 episode 3, Hedge Fund Homeboys, is a remake of Five Little Pigs.
Season 1 episode 7, Home is Where Heart Stops, is a remake of Plymouth Express.
Season 1 episode 9, Little Girl Lost, is a remake of The Adventure of Johnny Waverley.
Season 2 episode 1, Deep in Death, is a remake of G. Simenon’s Man on the Bench.
Season 2 episodes 17 & 18, are a remake of Fear Over the City by Henri Verneuil, Jean Laborde, and Francis Veber.
Season 2 episode 24, A Deadly Game, is a remake of The Man Who Knew Too Little by Robert Farrar and Howard Franklin.
Season 3, episode 12, Poof! You’re Dead, borrowed the idea of scaring the suspect from Agatha Christie’s The Tragedy at Marsdon Manor.
Season 3, episode 23, Pretty Dead, is very similar to The Body in the Library.
Season 4, episode 13, An Embarrassment of Bitches, is a remake of Dumb Witness.
Season 4, episode 18, A Dance with Death, borrows its main plot line from Murder in Mesopotamia.
Season 5, episode 13, Recoil, borrows a lot from The Kidnapped Prime Minister.
I will keep updating this post with more startling similarities.
And suddenly, in season 5, episode 18, The Lives of Others, Larry Shaw adds a reference to Hitchcock’s Rear Window. What happened? Did they get caught borrowing plot elements without attribution, 5 3/4 seasons into the series?
Season 6 episode 4, Number One Fan, is based on Poirot, Third Girl. As soon as I got the writers off the hook, they re-offended. They could not stay out of trouble, for 8 episodes!