Note: The world is a dumpster fire. I know it. You know it. Every day brings some kind of fresh hell, beamed directly into our brains via handheld dopamine-addiction machines that are practically fused to our bodies. I’m not ignoring it. I just want to talk about something else for a minute.
Whenever I talk about my favorite TV shows, there’s one that always elicits raised eyebrows and surprised mouth-noises. I get it. I wear glasses and graphic t-shirts. I quote musicals and plays. I’m pretty great on a trivia team. I largely fit the mold of “smart person.” So saying that I unironically love a long-running network procedural with a reputation for being aggressively middle-brow and not some obscure 1970s British science fiction show is a bit of a curveball. (For the record, I’ve never actually seen Blake’s 7, but I am aware of it.)
But I contain multitudes. And one of those multitudes unironically loves TV’s Bones. With my whole heart. And I love it on three different layers.
Let me back up and ease us into this. First off, what is Bones? I feel like it’s a show that many people are vaguely aware of, maybe watched an episode or two in a hotel room, maybe scrolled past it on some streaming service. Despite the fact that it ran for 12 years, was consistently a popular show, a lot of people have never seen it and don’t know anything about it. If that is you, you have come to the right place.
Bones, as previously stated, was a network police procedural. Every episode, a dead body was discovered, an investigation was conducted, a culprit was found and appropriately punished for their crimes. It revolved around Temperance “Bones” Brennan, a forensic anthropologist working out of the fictional Jeffersonian Institute (a thinly-veiled version of the real-world Smithsonian). Bones’ area of expertise was studying, well, bones (and other remains) to determine the method of death. She was partnered (more on that later) with an FBI agent Seeley Booth and worked with the rest of the Jeffersonian staff to solve crimes.
So, yes, it is, in many ways, an extremely standard cop show. Evidence is gathered, interrogations happen, shots are fired, cars are chased, criminals are handcuffed. Pretty much every episode hits every part of the “cop show” checklist. If that’s not your bag, it may be frustrating. But…it also might win you over.
Because the other thing Bones had was heart. A whole lot of it.
That’s the first layer that I love. Bones is unapologetically a show about love. The beating heart of the show is the relationship between Bones and Booth. It’s a classic slow-burn, will-they-won’t-they situation, but…honestly, it’s mostly a when-will-they. Almost immediately, it’s clear that these two people belong together, know they belong together and resist it for 6 seasons. Which is nearly unheard of and also cruel and also, somehow, didn’t kill the show when it finally happened. (Some argue it did. They are wrong.)
Bones and Booth are also a classic opposites attract couple. Bones is all about science. She’s logical, sometimes unemotional, focused on research and knowledge. Booth is all swagger and gut, intuitive, a man of action. Bones is ignorant of most pop culture. Booth is practically a nerd in his love of movies and TV shows. But, of course, Booth is not “nerdy,” he ‘s a jock. Bones is the uber-nerd, more comfortable with scientific terms than slang.
There are two things that make this work and make it work differently than most of the “jock and librarian” love stories we see. One, at their cores, Booth and Bones are actually very, very much alike and even share a similar childhood trauma. Bones’ parents abandoned her when she was 14. Booth’s father was an abusive alcoholic and he was raised by his paternal grandfather. That childhood loss and the desire for family and connection sent them in opposite directions (Bones into science and isolation, Booth into the military and then law enforcement), but it gives them a deeper connection to build on.
The other thing is a fun, structural trick that the show plays. While Booth is the jock and Bones is the nerd, their core personalities are the opposite of what one would expect. Bones is a sexual libertine, resisting traditional romantic relationships, while Booth is a die-hard romantic. He’s actually a soft touch while she’s the cynic. Just reversing that dynamic gives the characters room to grow and it gives the audience something it doesn’t expect in a package it recognizes.
Another part of that is that, from right off the bat, it’s clear that Booth is in love with Bones. Normally, this dynamic is played mainly for laughs and mainly runs on the randy, worldly man sexualizes the intellectual woman. The guy makes a crude joke, the woman blushes, but also laughs. The guy finds ways to work innuendo and double entredres into every situation, the woman smacks him (playfully). He openly lusts after her and she secretly loves it.
But that’s not how it plays out on Bones. Booth’s love for Bones is almost courtly. He acknowledges that she’s attractive, but he is constantly complimenting her, encouraging her. His whole mission in life is to get Bones to open up, emotionally. He doesn’t pursue her…ever. Over the course of the show, Bones takes several lovers and has deep, romantic relationships. Booth has maybe two? Sure, he can be crude at times. But he’s that kind of noble character who always seems to respect women. (Or at least be open to it; he’s also religious and can be quite snobby.)
That makes the emotional journey for Bones about exactly that: opening herself up to emotions that she has stifled for her entire life. On the show, Bones is never presented as anywhere on the autism spectrum. Her inability to read social cues, her bluntness, her unemotional aspect is always treated as, well, the result of trauma. And something that she learns to be better at over the course of the show. The main catalyst for that is Booth. Which is why we root for them so much.
The other layer of love that runs through the show is in the ensemble. It’s very much what the kid from The Princess Bride would call a “kissing show.” It’s telling that the final scene of the show is about three different, longstanding couples, entering the next phase of their lives together. It’s a show where almost every main character winds up coupled with another main character at some point or other. Some of them several different times.
I heard a story about the first season of the show. There are two side characters, scientist Jack Hodgins and artist Angele Montenegro, who, in most shows would be slightly above background characters. The kind of quirky sidekicks who generally just pop in to deliver exposition and a quick joke before getting out of the way. But something funny happened.
The way I heard is that the two actors who played those parts began dating during the first season and decided to play their few interactions with some flirty energy. The writers and producers noticed and liked it and wrote into the script. That relationship became a cornerstone of the show. In many ways, it set a standard that a lot of other shows followed by having two side characters have a successful ship (in the internet parlance) while the main characters get their slow burn.
That relationship lasted long after the actors stopped dating. Which I think is also a testament to the vibe of the show. They still at least appeared to like working together and still had great chemistry on screen. But that sense of people could fall in love in this show became pervasive.
Bones is very much a show about love. And I like love.
The other layer that it’s important to me about the show is a professional one. When I moved from writing plays to writing TV, I was unemployed, house-sitting for a friend and watching a ton of television. Bones was on TNT for something like 12 hours a day and I’m pretty sure, most days, I watched all 12 hours. All in all, I’m reasonably sure that I’ve watched every episode at least four times, many of them several more time. It is, unironically, how I learned to write television.
When I talk about Bones to students, I say that it’s a good show to watch because you can see the seams. In a lot of prestige drama, even I can’t actually see how it was made. The structure is so scrambled and complex, it’s hard to untangle. Bones, as a police procedural, is not. It follows a formula and you can see how they make it all work. It’s not quite a clockwork as a Law & Order episode…but it’s not far off.
That said, it also does some very smart things with its structure that help keep the episodes feeling fresh and engaging. More comforting than predictable. One way they achieve this is in the “You Have To See This” moment. It’s a very, very standard trope in police procedurals. The main characters are having a conversation, sometimes about the case, sometimes about whatever emotional thing is happening. One of those quirky side characters pops into the room and says, “You have to see this.” They all go into another room to look at some piece of evidence and you get an exposition dump of clues.
Bones upends this. Because it’s set in a lab and because everyone has an actual, specific job and because there’s a boss, usually what happens is two characters are having an emotional scene and then their boss comes in and says, “You said you had something to show me.” That’s when we get the exposition. But it’s often colored by whatever emotional thing just happened. It’s a small difference, but, I think, it’s one of the reasons the show had such longevity. It keeps the emotional story front and center. It gives the exposition more urgency and tension. I don’t know how conscious that decision was, but I find it significant.
As a lifelong student of television (which sound better than “I was raised by the boob tube”), those small changes are what makes a show stand out. They’re what makes a show re-watchable. The show premiered in 2005 and I’m pretty sure that for most of that time, there hasn’t been a single day where it wasn’t playing somewhere in America. That’s incredible staying power that a lot of shows don’t have. So clearly, it’s doing something right. Actually several things.
The third and final layer is mostly about long-running shows. Bones spans an incredible length of cultural time. Watching a long-running police procedural, in particular, is watching a running account of what’s going on in culture. Law & Order really kicked off the “ripped from the headlines” cop show, but it’s now a signature feature. Watching Bones, you can see how we discussed gender, race, politics. You can see cultural fads come and go. They solved crimes that involved hipsters, furries, comic book nerds, kink communities. If there was a segment on Today about it between 2005 and 2017, it showed up on Bones.
It’s also a good picture of how things have changed. All of these types of shows have an episode on trans people (almost exclusively trans women) and, while the handling is never that sensitive, they’re still far to the left of the dialogue we have right now. In some ways, despite the sense that these shows are conservative, they were quite liberal. In general.
It’s still copaganda. The cops are still always right. They are generally noble. They are hardworking and dedicated to finding the truth, even when it’s inconvenient. They seem to have unlimited resources and can perform literal miracles to get to the facts. We all know that’s not how it actually works. But it is nice to fantasize.
But, on balance, it’s great TV. It’s funny and heartfelt. It looks like the people working on it had a good time doing it (the cast changes are rare and often traumatic). It’s a great way to spend an afternoon when you’re hiding from the world. And it’s a great way to learn what makes for good TV.
But…mostly…I just really like it.