Lockdown, Lowdown… Let’s Talk About the Hit TV Show Bones

By Donald “Braveheart” Stewart

Lockdown, lowdown…

Before he ended up saving the world in SWAT, and before she went on to play Angela in Animal kingdom, Fox gave us the keys to the fictional Jeffersonian Institute with David Boreanaz and Emily Deschanel holding the keys

Bones was 12 seasons and 246 episodes of supreme joy and intrigue that took forensic science off in a brand new direction whilst also keeping us on track with police procedural due to the involvement of the FBI. It was excellent stuff. We loved the will they won’t they nature of whether the man, Special Agent Seeley Booth would make a move on the female forensic anthropologist upon whom the whole TV drama was based – Dr. Temperance “Bones” Brennan.

Bones was a new type of character. Highly intelligent, academically and not emotionally, people struggled to connect with people. As well as having more PhDs than is healthy, she was also a highly successful author with wealth that perhaps equaled the inspiration behind the series – Kathy Reichs. Reichs made an appearance a la Hitchcock in the show and her influence was left to be claimed as only the inspiration behind it…

An issue which hindered the possibility of any hook up was the fact that Booth was Catholic and very much a practicing one, whilst Bones was a scientist with firm, and very bluntly negative views of religion. Her inability to find, on many occasions, a sensitive side for anything much was a dramatic gift in her relationship with Booth but also the rest of the characters.

She had a criminal father who was played by the legendary Ryan O’Neal, but we also got supporting characters with fantastic depth and back stories.

There was Angela Montenegro (Michaela Conlin) who had her own strange relationship with her father – ZZ Top’s Billy Gibson – especially when she was due to get married to her colleague, Dr. Jack Hodgins, (T. J. Thyne) and he nervously discovered that he needed his approval!

But from the tale of two fathers, we were hardly done. In fact, it was just the beginning…

Perhaps the best relationships came with two characters who were not to feature in all 12 seasons BUT whose shadows were cats throughout.

John Frances Daley made light work of Lance Sweets, a psychologist often trying to add in his professional expertise to the two principal characters who eschewed his less than “Sweet” science. His death was a devastating blow to the whole of the Jeffersonian. Given that his own relationship with one of the unfortunate interns, Daisy was so fraught it was an irony that he would have any form of relationship advice, for anyone!

Then there was Zack Addy. Played by Eric Millegan, he was one of the other unfortunate interns who end up having to work alongside a frosty “Bones” but ends up really enjoying the experience; so much so he returned when he qualified to join their team. Much trusted and valued as a member of the team, when he was exposed at the end of season 3, the shock waves were palpable. See serial killers… See their meddling…

Eventually, of course, Bones and Booth get together, have a daughter, a son and manage to look after Parker, Booth’s son from a previous relationship. There was another wedding, between Hodgins and Montenegro, postponed because Montenegro discovered she was already married! Her future husband, a reluctant millionaire – as if – who loses all his money but ends up at the alter anyway, and then in season 11 ends up in a wheelchair, disabled just added to their soap like charm.

There was Dr. Camille (Tamara Taylor) who previously was in a relationship with Booth, which was rekindled for a while, cooled and then she ended up in a new relationship with a devout Muslim – certainly daring in the US of its time. Her beau was another one of those interns who came and went with the type of regularity that made you think there may be something sinister in the basement!

Whilst Daley who played Sweets had asked to leave the series to pursue other options, I think the rest of the cast would have gone on forever. And they would have welcomed the opportunity to increase the back stories but it was cancelled by the network and whilst every so often there are rumors of a revival – given that Dexter and Criminal Minds are returning, hardly fanciful thinking – but the ending made sense. Kind of.

We got the King of the Lab sorted and the people were ready to move on. Would we want them to move back? The problem always with getting the band back together can always be that they no longer sound like the power hungry group they once were. Bones was a perfect antidote to the times we lived in then. People have moved on.

As it was aired first in 2005, Sky were the channel in the UK where it was to be found – terrestrial TV never got a look in, so I was glad to be a subscriber and to be fair it was certainly one of the very reasons why the subscription was worth it!

British television is a curious affair. Begun through the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) it is funded through the universal license fee. In essence, if you wanted to watch the television , you had to pay the license fee. The BBC got it all and is state run, albeit at arms-length. Then came along commercial television in the form of the Independent Television (ITV) in 1955. Designed to bring a bit of competition to the BBC, it was paid for through advertising but still free to air… well they didn’t add another license fee to it. By the time that I was born, 1965, there was BBC1, BBC2 and ITV. And that was it. It was still years before Bruce Springsteen would moan that there were 55 channels and nothing on but here in the UK, we kept this going until in 1982, we added a fourth channel and in 1997, a fifth. With sparkling imagination, they were called Channel Four and ehm Channel Five… In between came Sky and we understood what Springsteen meant. And so, my childhood and leading up to early adulthood we had three options… But the program made were exceptionally good. And so, here is some critical nostalgia as the lockdown has brought a plethora of reruns, new formats and platforms and old classics trying to make their way back into our consciousness as broadcasters flood their schedules with classics… or are they classics at all? Let me take you through an armchair critics’ view of what we have to see, to find out… Welcome to the Lockdown Lowdown…

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