Bones, "The Bones on the Blue Line": Author! Author?

A quick review of tonight's "Bones" coming up just as soon as I turn to page 187...

Fienberg and I joked on yesterday's podcast that this episode was made 100% for me, and while I doubt Hart Hanson even knows who I am (what with me not regularly watching or writing about his show), "The Bones on the Blue Line" did manage to neatly hit two of my buttons.

First, it gave a nice showcase to John Francis Daley, who's as good an expressive an actor as a grown-up as he was as l'il Sam Weir on "Freaks and Geeks." (I also don't know if it was intentional, but I appreciated the Apatovian symmetry of Daley's character getting engaged to Carla Gallo's, what with her being the female lead on "Undeclared.")

Second, it finally addressed a question that's been bugging me since the pilot: how does a woman like Temperance Brennan, who has so little aptitude for or interest in understanding the emotions and motivations of others, become a best-selling crime novelist? Particularly since her books are, as described here, clear roman a clefs based on her work with Booth? (And with a heroine named after Brennan's creator, Kathy Reichs, in a bit of real-world/fictional-world quid pro quo.)

Well, it turns out that Brennan doesn't write the books - or, at least, that she doesn't come up with the parts dealing with emotion, or romance, or whatever it is that's on page 187. It does seem a little sketchy that Angela wouldn't realize just how much she was contributing to the books (I imagine the first drafts would be entirely technical), nor that Brennan wouldn't have realized before now that her success as an author comes as much from the "unimportant parts" as from the science, but it's about the most plausible explanation we're going to get.

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Bones, "The Man in the Outhouse": Two guys, a girl and a Thai place

Quick spoilers for last night's "Bones" coming up just as soon as I get my dive certification...

Even by the usual "Bones" mystery standards, last night's case was particularly weak, the sort of generic and dull riff on reality TV that probably every other crime procedural of the last five years has done at one point or another. And while I'll always be in the bag for Carla Gallo thanks to "Undeclared," I thought her role as the second in the revolving-door series of replacement Zachs was too broadly and repetitively written. I get that each of these people will (other than Clark) only be around for an episode and there's only so much time to devote to the role after the writers have dealt with the mystery, the Booth/Brennan interaction, etc., but I hope the future guests are more interesting.

So, since the episode was pretty much a dud outside the usual goodness involving our two leads and Dr. Sweets, here's a question for the fans: at what point, if ever, do you want to see Booth and Brennan actually get together? I'm of the belief that Unresolved Sexual Tension can, in fact, be resolved without ruining the show (see PB&J on "The Office," or the various periods when Sam and Diane were together on "Cheers"), and that certain shows in fact get irreparably harmed by trying to postpone the coupling too long ("Ed"), but I haven't been watching "Bones" long or carefully enough to have a strong opinion on this one.

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Sepinwall on TV: 'Bones' goes for the funnybone

I hadn't originally planned to write a column on the "Bones" season premiere, but then my actual column for the day wound up running shorter than planned, and my editor asked me for a few hundred words on another topic. Hence, a "Bones" review-let. Not much to read, but we can use this post as a place to talk about tonight's two-hour season premiere, which is a little heavy on the Clark Griswold humor at times but comes together by the end. Click here to read the full post

Bones, "The Pain in the Heart": Tricks and treats

Quick spoilers for the "Bones" season finale coming up just as soon as I reorganize my Social Distortion record collection...

Well, that was pretty disappointing.

On the one hand, I'm glad they didn't make Sweets turn out to be Gormogon (or his apprentice), as it would have been cheap (the only new character of the season turns out to be the big bad of the season) and it would have deprived us of the Sweets/Bones/Booth scenes, as well as depriving the artist formerly known as Sam Weir of employment.

On the other, the resolution to last week's shooting cliffhanger was so lame that it left a bad taste in my mouth for the rest of the episode. We all knew Booth wasn't going to be dead -- you don't kill the buddy on a buddy show -- but to resolve it in such a silly way, with no real emotional follow-up was just awful. Sure, Bones was annoyed for a few scenes about Booth not telling her the truth, but nobody else was either upset or relieved to see the guy, and other than Angela being too sad to go to the funeral alone, nobody even seemed that bothered when it seemed he was dead. If they were going to shrug the thing off so quickly, why even bother to do it? This was the worst kind of sweeps stunting.

As a light comedy with a bit of mystery worked in, "Bones" works very well. (The show it most reminds me of, oddly enough, is the '70s James Garner private eye classic "The Rockford Files," in terms of its laid-back approach to the material.) When it tries to travel into deeper emotional waters, things get rocky. At least, they did last night.

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Soap stories

Grab-bag time. Spoilers for, in order, "House," "Bones" and "Gossip Girl" coming up just as soon as I angle my new flatscreen...

It's funny how, in the fictional universe of "House," Amber got the short end of the stick by not making the team, while in the real world of making "House," Anne Dudek seems like the big winner. Where Taub, Kutner and Thirteen get a few minor bits of business each week, Cutthroat Bitch gets her own subplots with Wilson and tends to make far more of an impression each week than the other three combined. ("Cupid" fans: do you think Dudek might make a good remake Claire, assuming she and Bobby Cannavale have chemistry?)

Meanwhile, the writers have started to remember that Chase and Cameron exist. Last week, we got House and Chase's abbreviated bowling date, and this week we got Cameron inserting herself back into House-world for a single case, and showing that, while she's outgrown her crush on House, she misses the work that they did together. I never really had a huge attachment to any of the junior docs when the original team was in place, and yet moments like the "All pretty girls are fungible" scene give me a greater appreciation for them. It's not that they're necessarily better actors or characters than the newbies, but they have years of shared history with House, and that's the sort of thing you can't trade on with Mini-Stud or Kumar.

As for the case itself, it was an amusing payoff to House's long-running soap fixation, but what really struck me was House's hypocrisy in the final scene with Cuddy. He's mad at himself because the "treat, then diagnose" philosophy should have failed, and only succeeded by sheer luck, but he's projecting his anger onto Cuddy because she allegedly is the one who's supposed to put the breaks on him. The problem I have with that -- not from a storytelling perspective, because we know House is a hypocrite, but just from a House's logic perspective -- is that House always gets his way, whether Cuddy tries to stop him or not. Unless the writers use this episode as an excuse to have House pay Cuddy more heed in the future, he was just full of bull there.

A very good "Bones," and I'm impressed by their ability to balance their usual humor with the higher stakes of the dad-on-trial story in a way that never felt awkward. The David Kelley shows (and, in the early going, "Eli Stone") usually use their humor as a crutch to keep viewers from having to take the dramatic material all that seriously, but it flowed much more naturally here. I bought Temperance being concerned for her dad and yet still able to joke with Booth while Sweets was on the stand, for instance.

Speaking of Sweets, good to see how they've contrived to have John Francis Daley join the cast permanently. I'm always happy for a "Freaks and Geeks"er to find grown-up work, and those scenes are often the highlight of each episode. One minor complaint: Brennan joining in with Booth's "Do you like us, Sweets?" mockery outside the courthouse didn't seem in character. For the most part, the writers are very good at mining humor from Brennan's stunted, overly-rational social skills, but this didn't fit.

Finally, I think I'm done with "Gossip Girl." It's not that I think the show is doing anything wrong; if anything, the execution in the post-strike episodes seems higher than previously, as they're using the entire cast better and have made appropriate additions like Michelle Trachtenberg as the evil Georgina.

I've just come to the conclusion that my problem with the show isn't the lack of self-aware "O.C." humor (though there isn't much of that), or that I'm creeped out by all this focus on Cindy Lou Who's sex life (though it was definitely not my favorite part of this episode), or that I feel too old to be watching this show (I've recently gotten hooked on MTV's "The Paper," and am working on a column about it).

I've just come to the realization that I have no interest in who gets to be Queen Bitch of that school, and since that's what's the fundamental focus of the series (and, I presume, the books), it just ain't my cuppa.

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Biff, babies and blonde Morlocks

Since I hit "HIMYM" and "House" last night, I thought I'd weigh in quickly on a couple of shows I watch semi-regularly but don't often blog about. Spoilers for "Big Bang Theory" and "Bones" coming up just as soon as I see if Pottery Barn Kids sells a metal detector wand...

I flat-out hated "Big Bang Theory" when it debuted in the fall, and softened on it somewhat when it returned last month with the rest of the CBS comedies. Mainly, though, I watch it because my wife likes it, and she takes enough for the team that I have to yield the remote to her when the Chuck Lorre comedies come on each week. But credit where credit's due: last night's episode, with Leonard buying a life-size replica of H.G. Wells' time machine (I'm guessing it was a prop from "Time After Time"), was pretty funny, particularly the sequence where the other three nerds moved around the apartment at high speed to simulate the effects of time travel.

My primary complaint with the show, as mentioned in the March review, is that the writers can't decide whether they feel affection or contempt for the geeks, and I think the show works much better when it's being slightly affectionate. This was an episode that, in theory, was about the guys taking their nerd obsessions too far, but that was really just Penny venting. The whole time machine purchase was presented as harmless and entertaining for the guys.

That said, I think the writers need to be really careful with how they're writing Sheldon. Jim Parsons is the best thing about the show, and I appreciate that his character's borderline-Asperger's difficulty in understanding normal human behavior is a big part of the comedy, but they've made him so hostile about it that it's starting to grate.

Just compare the way the "Big Bang" people write Sheldon versus how team "Bones" writes Dr. Brennan. She's equally clueless about how people are expected to interact with one another, and often puts her foot in her mouth, but it's rarely as aggressive as Sheldon is every week.

By now, the "Bones" writers have recognized that the plots matter much less than placing Temperance in various situations where her reaction will be unusual, and so they barely even bothered with the mechanics of how she and Booth would be allowed temporary custody of the baby. The point was just to see how she would act around a baby, and it was as amusing as expected. The mystery itself went according to Most Recognizable Guest Star Syndrome, where as soon as Thomas Wilson showed up, I knew he dunnit. (Though it gives me yet another opportunity to link to the never-not-funny Biff's Question Song, and I ain't gonna complain much.)

What did everybody else think? Click here to read the full post

Bones bonus

I had intended for today's column to actually be a three-fer, with the "Nip/Tuck" review, the "My So-Called Life" DVD preview, and also a few words about tonight's Halloween episode of "Bones." But I only have so much space in the paper, and went on longer than planned about McNamara/Troy in LA, so I'm going to take advantage of the unlimited space of this blog and write a bit about "Bones" after the jump.

Now, I never really warmed to "Bones" when it first debuted. I liked David Boreanaz displaying his light comedy chops as Booth, but Brennan seemed less a character to me than a collection of anti-social tics designed to approximate Dr. House. (Plus, on a more nitpicky level, I never bought into the notion that a woman this clueless about and uninterested in human behavior would either want to or be capable of writing a series of best-selling mystery novels.) Given how many TV shows I watch in a given week, I don't usually make time for crime procedurals, and on the rare occasions when I do, it's usually "NCIS," which makes me all nostalgic for the light dramas of my '80s youth.

But people I know like Dan Fienberg kept insisting that "Bones" had become a lot of fun. So when the show added John Francis Daley from "Freaks and Geeks" to the cast last week as a young shrink counseling Booth and Brennan about their (professional) relationship, I decided to give it another shot -- and I'm glad I did.

In the long period of time that I've been away, it would seem that the writers have played to Boreanaz's lighter side more and more, and he and Emily Deschanel have developed a nice comic rapport. Last week's therapy scenes were genuinely funny (and even kinda sweet when Booth thought Brennan wouldn't want to know him under different circumstances), and tonight's show has a lot of good scenes of them sparking off each other. The pictured Halloween costumes are a nice touch (I've always had a weakness for Halloween episodes, especially on dramas), but even better is a scene where the duo are interviewing a fundamentalist preacher. Bones the empiricist seems genuinely interested in how the guy justifies parts of his belief system, but naturally asks about it in the bluntest way possible, and Booth has to explain to the guy that this is just her being curious.

The mysteries are still limited by the nature of the format -- given X number of suspects in a 41-minute episode, odds are the killer's identity will be obvious well before the heroes figure it out -- but I like these characters and I was entertained watching them work. Since I'm not interested in any of the reality show options in this hour, I might have to work "Bones" into semi-regular rotation. Click here to read the full post