About a year ago, Bones creator Hart Hanson was presented with the opportunity to write a new crime show in a TV market saturated with CSI clones. Turns out, Hanson is up for a challenge.

In the 1990s, he developed the TV series Traders, about a group of stock brokers in Toronto. "Coming up with new stories set in an investment bank was just really tough," he says now of his creation, which won several Canadian television awards.

After three years of that particular challenge, his now-agent cautioned him against moving away from a comfortable career in Canada, saying "you'll just be another of the millions of people in L.A. looking for a break," Hanson remembers. In response, he headed south, and soon got that break on Cupid, starring Jeremy Piven (Entourage) and Paula Marshall (Out of Practice).

Hanson went on to work for such character-driven shows as Judging Amy and Joan of Arcadia before 20th Century Fox approached him about the idea for Bones. When he told them that he had no interest in a procedural drama, "they said, 'Oh no, we know. We think your take on a forensics show is what we're looking for,' " Hanson recalls.

So he met with executive producer Barry Josephson about the idea of basing a show on forensic anthropologist Kathy Reichs and the character Temperance Brennan, which she created in a series of bestselling books. "We had a real meeting of the minds on how Bones might unfold, so I signed on, wrote the pilot, and here we are," Hanson says.

Reichs herself has a producer's credit on the show. "She was very involved at the beginning, and intermittently we have her come in to sit with the writers," explains Hanson. "She reads every script and gives us comments on them, and she's a pretty good resource for the writers. When they're coming up with ideas, they call and ask, 'Is this possible? Would this ever happen?'"

Character under the microscope

Hanson's solution to making Bones stand out from the crime drama crowd was to focus on character and humour as much as the case of the week - following the precedent, he says, of shows like Moonlighting and The X-Files.

Bones' version of Dave and Maddy, Mulder and Scully is FBI agent Seeley Booth (David Boreanaz) and anthropologist Brennan (Emily Deschanel), who works with him on cases where the bodies are too decomposed or mummified for normal investigative techniques.

"We found that you can take almost any murder and figure out how the body degrades to the point where a forensic anthropologist is the only person who is going to be able to give you any clues, and we go from there," says Hanson. "So instead of finding a fresh body, we usually find one that's anywhere between a week and 10,000 years old, and it applies to her."