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"BONES" SUCCEEDS AS "CSI" LITE
October 21, 2005
Though the networks haven't relied upon them this year as much as the last few, you still don't have to flip much to find a new forensics-based procedural airing in the primetime hours. After all, "CSI" remains TV's most-watched show, even if it no longer claims first in water cooler chatter.
Fox's "Bones" (Tuesdays at 8 p.m.) has been one of this year's better received crime-scene clones, drawing a sizable audience leading into "House" and earning itself an early full season pickup. The success is warranted, if only because "Bones" easily reaches its less-than-lofty goal of aping "CSI" but with a lighter attitude and a couple of half-twists.
All the Gil Grissom staples are here. Squirming bugs that offer up a key clue in solving the case. Small talk about cranial fissures and other icky lab speak. The latest in high-tech forensic gear. What's different is a consistent focus on the personal lives of the "Bones" investigators, particularly the show's two leads - Emily Deschanel as Dr. Temperance Brennan and David Boreanaz as FBI Agent Seeley Booth. (What kind of drunken night of Scrabble spawned those names?)
It's true that the "CSI" franchise has dug more and more into the lives of its characters as it goes on, but such exploration always leads to dark and depressing storylines - Sara Sidle's alcoholism on "CSI," Horatio Caine's tortured past on "CSI: Miami." "Bones" takes a refreshingly lighthearted approach, immediately setting up a David-and-Maddie/Mulder-and-Scully relationship between its two primary characters. Booth takes great joy in tormenting the "squints" - his pet name for the scientists who help him put a name to his latest unidentified body.
Brennan is head squint, a noted author who possesses both brains and brawn (the latter in the form of a mean roundhouse kick) but has a problem connecting emotionally with other people. Typical Brennan dialogue: "You can always count on the dead." It's not easy for her to reason her growing attraction to Booth, a smarmy ex-sniper who has little interest in science, but also takes to moping when he's not awarded access to watch Brennan's team perform their flashy experiments. So in between all the crime solving, there's a lot of flirty bickering between the two.
The setup alone probably reads like a snooze fest, but "Bones" actually works more often than not thanks to Deschanel, more coolly alluring than classically beautiful, and Boreanaz, still using the sly charm and droll line readings he perfected back on "Angel." Watching these two solve an assortment of generic crimes, I'll admit, is more fun than it probably should be.
This series is never going to be a masterpiece of the small screen, but, then again, it isn't trying to, a fact easily discerned by the 10th time Brennan yells, "Don't call me 'Bones!'" - her much-loathed nickname that Booth loves to address her by. (It makes me laugh, but only because Deschanel so closely mimics Harrison Ford's "Don't call me Junior!" demands in "Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade.")
I certainly wouldn't recommend "Bones" over the far-superior "Gilmore Girls," a true original that's as far from a procedural as you can get, which airs at the same time. But if you can't get enough crime solving in your TV diet and have a TiVo handy, you could do a lot worse than awarding "Bones" a season pass.
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