Fox Had One Main Concern About Bones, But It Was Quickly Resolved
Forensic anthropology is not for the impatient. It requires long, tedious hours of poring over and trying to make sense of bone fragments, so you'd better be a real nerd when it comes to loving the minutiae of the human skeleton. It's also not a field for the squeamish. As you might imagine, the human remains you have to recover and analyze at crime scenes can be deeply upsetting.
"Bones" fans would know all about that. The longtime FOX mainstay was full of utterly gross and gnarly scenes, like the time its heroes, Special Agent Seeley Booth (David Boreanaz) and Dr. Temperance "Bones" Brennan (Emily Deschanel), found themselves staring down the barrel of a bathtub full of liquified body parts in the season 2 episode "The Truth in the Lye" (September 27, 2006). Bones, never one to be easily phased by a nauseating sight in her workplace, quickly sets to work examining the melted meat popsicle in front of her. By that point, though, viewers had a pretty firm grasp on the unpleasant realities of her profession and knew what they were getting themselves into. (Well, perhaps not the kiddos who tuned in for audition week on "American Idol" in 2011, only to watch somebody's head blow up on "Bones" right after.)
It's a little funny, then, that FOX was initially concerned about the premise of the show being uninteresting. In the book "Bones: The Official Companion," creator Hart Hanson and producers Kathy Reichs and Barry Josephson revealed that the network harbored doubts about the series' appeal. Apparently, its executives had been lingering under the false belief that being a "bone doctor" meant never leaving the lab and staring at boring, dried-up skeletal bits all day long. Not necessarily something that lends itself to must-see television (though I'd watch it).
Bones is a magician, but for skeletons
After doing some research, the "Bones" team was able to get FOX behind them. "One of the really daunting tasks that a forensic anthropologist has to deal with is that frequently the human remains are extremely compromised," Josephson noted. "This means we have to find a reason for this character to exist, and the reason is that she's almost like a magician."
Indeed, if you want to see some real-life wizardry, just watch an actual forensic anthropologist — like Reichs, the direct inspiration for Bones herself — extrapolate loads of information from nothing more than some scattered bone pieces. "Sometimes she can be wrong, but most of the time she will be right," Josephson continued. "But her science is great: it enables her to deduce things from these bits and pieces of evidence that she has."
Over the course of doing their homework, the "Bones" creatives also came to realize the show would have its fair share of disgusting moments. "And many times those bones are going to be or in some sort of bad situation, like the tub or like exhuming a body in any state of deterioration, and so on," Josephson pointed out. "We said to the studio, 'It's not going to be a horror show, but sometimes it won't be easy to look at. We will try to render it in the best way that we can.'"
The rom-com interplay between Bones and Booth (something that came up during filming on the "Bones" pilot) would provide the perfect foil to the horrors they'd encounter on the job. That and the show's more whimsical cases-of-the-week, which saw its leads desperately trying to pass for everything from cowboys to bowlers to underground fighters, certainly went a long way towards lightening the mood.