Fall TV Friday – 2005 – Bones

Bones – FOX – 5 Seasons – USA

In October 2009 I decided to take a look back at the new shows that debuted during the Fall of 2005. These are their stories.

We have a joke around these parts about Booth and Bones. Before I watched this pilot I’d never seen an episode of Bones but the long running joke at my place goes a little something like this: An ad for Bones will appear on television and it will usually play up the ‘will they or won’t’ they aspects of the Booth and Bones relationship, just as the ad’s finishing we’ll say something along the lines of “aww, we love Booth & Bones.” – I didn’t say it was a funny joke.

We’re not a hundred percent sure what we’re getting at but I suspect that we have an odd fondness for a show we’ve never actually watched. It always felt as though we should be watching Booth & Bones because they’re Booth and Bones and we love them. So when I finally got to sit down and actually watch the first ever adventure of our Booth and our Bones I was more than a little excited.

In 2005 FOX were having a rough time ratings wise. For a long while FOX has been in the unenviable position of having a lot of middle-range hits. In 2005 that meant that FOX only had two Top 30 hits – American Idol and House – but had a lot of hits between numbers 30 to 60 – The Simpsons, The War At Home, American Dad, Prison Break, Family Guy, 24. These shows are hits for FOX but sit alongside flops for the Big 3 Networks (or the Big 2 and NBC) like Night Stalker, The Apprentice: Martha Stewart and Joey.

In 2010 terms FOX has a series of success stories in Fringe, Glee, Lie To Me and The Cleveland Show but they rate about the same as flops for other networks like Hank, The Forgotten or Three Rivers. These lower expectations means that FOX can appeal to a niche audience of sorts and take bigger risks creatively – of course the flipside of that in the early naughties was that FOX = cancelled. FOX brought some of the best shows of the early naughties to the airwaves: Firefly, Undeclared, Arrested Development – and then cancelled all of them because the ratings couldn’t get out of the gutter.

With that in mind enter Bones a criminal investigation series that feels like CSI for a FOX audience because, well, that’s exactly what it is. Bones is an anthropologist who works for the FBI, she’s teamed up with Booth (aww, we love Booth and Bones!) and they have a sassy back and forth with each other, which makes them yet another odd couple who solves crimes together. Booth knows people, Bones knows dead people. She’s the one with the doctorate; he’s the one with the badge and the gun. At one point he even tells her “we can be Scully and Mulder” but she doesn’t get the joke because apparently Bones grew up in a world without the 90’s.

To kick things off they find a decomposed body in the bottom of the lake and it’s Bones’s job to find out who the body belongs to and how the person was murdered. Naturally she has the help of a ragtag team of misfit geniuses including the young one, the conspiracy nut and the hot girl. They’re helping the FBI but all work for the Jeffersonian Natural History Museum, which seems to be the best funded damn museum in the world. The main piece of equipment they have is a large holographic computer which can recreate the victim’s face and body based on the bone structure. That’s all fine and dandy, I don’t necessarily believe they’d have a hologram because they are just a museum and not the Rebel Alliance but I’m willing to suspend disbelief. Then things get kind of stupid when they use the exact same program to recreate the murder. We watch the holograms fight with each other in a demonstration of how the girl was probably killed and at that point my suspended disbelief collapsed in a mess on the floor.

The case in the pilot is about an intern who had an affair with a Senator and then was killed and it’s all just kind of boring. I like the cast, especially Booth and Bones (aww, we love Booth and Bones!) but I kind of wish they had something more interesting to do than just run around solving crimes we’ve seen a thousand times before. At the beginning of the pilot Bones arrives at the airport and says she’s just got back from Guatemala where she’d been diving in mass graves – doesn’t that sound like such a better show than yet another forensic investigation series?

Still, I like that the show is focused more on the characters than on the crime. They do tend spend too much time talking about their pasts in that unnatural way that people who genuinely know each other never would. So it leads to scenes where Bones gets to say things like “My most meaningful relationships are with dead people.” (Hey! Just like Haley Joel Osment!) We also find out that she’s divorced and an orphan and that she shuts everyone out… but will she ever be able to let Booth in? FUTURE ALERT – she does.

Bones is more character driven than Criminal Minds which was more case driven. Yes, Bones is a procedural but the characters talk about something other than the case. The combination of character development and the week to week case angle has to the reason that not only has Bones survived for the first three years of its life in that Top 30 to 60 range of shows but it has to be the reason Bones has been able to grow and move up and become a full blown Top 30 show. While the other 2005 debutant Prison Break lost its audience over time Bones has been able to increase its audience and that’s a rare feat that I’m sure has more than a little to do with the relationship between Booth and Bones.

Aww, we love Booth and Bones.

Good, Alright, Bad Or Ugly?
Alright

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