No Bones About It *Groan*

So lately I've been watching Bones on Netflix. Abby's a big fan of the series and I caught most of an episode and decided to give it a try. It's a little CSI-ish (which I don't care for), but at least the smart characters feel like they were written by smart people, not by stupid people who think they know what "smart" sounds like. It's decently well-acted and the subject matter is pretty interesting, and I admire the way the show has turned some prime-time drama conventions on their ear.

The main characters of the show are Bones and Booth, a forensic anthropologist and the FBI agent she consults for, respectively. Normally a show about two oddly-matched bedfellows would pilot with a chance meeting, but not this one. In the pilot for Bones, our heroes already know each other, have already worked together, and don't like each other all that much.

I'll give you another example, a better example. I recently watched episode 8 (fair-warning, this will get into some episode-specific spoilers). It starts out with Bones wanting a gun and Booth denying her application to get one. It's the weekend, so everyone is going home, except that there is a convicted murderer who is about to be executed (in thirty-odd hours) and his defense attorney convinces Booth to take another look at the case to address some evidence that didn't quite add up, but hadn't been strong enough to stand up to appeal. Booth enlists Bones (meaning he now owes her a favor), she calls in her techs, one of whom, Angela, has a date that night, and we've all seen this sort of things before. They'll spend the episode racing against the clock and at the last minute they find the piece of evidence that exonerates the condemned and implicates the real killer. Bones will call in her favor and get a gun, and Angela will have a ruined date night but it will end with some form of "awwwww" moment between her and her date or her and her coworkers. Our expectations our set.

Only that's totally not what happens. It starts out like you'd expect--the team finds and interprets evidence better than the previous team had. They're led on a merry chase--it turns out that the body of the victim had been moved, so they went to find where the murder had actually taken place and find... more bodies. Not only was the convicted killer guilty, he was a serial killer, but his execution would be stayed until the other murders could be investigated. He'd played them to buy a little more time for himself. Bones was told in no uncertain terms that she should never be allowed to carry a gun. Angela's date calls her a freak, she calls him a bastard, and nothing more is said of it.

They'd managed to surprise me. And that's encouraging, because with all the badly-written television out there, it's nice to find something that takes itself seriously enough to put on a good show, but not so seriously that it doesn't respect its audience.

Have a good weekend, all.

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