That wasn't the only evidence that Hanson was deviating from the more formal interview persona. The Master Class started with a glowing introduction which promised an exciting session. "Exciting's going to be tough," Hanson protested to interviewer Gillian Flynn of Entertainment Weekly, an attractive woman wearing a short dress and gorgeous boots. "I'm glad you're showing a little leg."

Long after she'd recovered from that, Flynn asked Hanson about the two-hour season opener, which is being filmed in England. He voiced his frustration with the FOX dictate that the two-parter must feel like one cohesive episode, but each hour must be able to stand alone as well. "So it has to be seamless but with a great big seam in it," Hanson noted before adding: "I said 'semen' (i.e., 'seam in'). I knew that would happen."

At that point, our mutual acquaintance Will Dixon leaned over and whispered to me: "That's why I call him my smarter, funnier Beavis." I won't speculate on who's Butt-head in that equation.

Hanson and Dixon met in the world of Canadian television, where Hanson's long, varied, award-winning career meant absolutely nothing when he moved down to Los Angeles. He got a job on Cupid based on his Ally McBeal spec script, "which is why now, 10 years on, I'm a light dramedy writer instead of a serious drama writer: I didn't write a Homicide Life on the Street. I wrote Ally McBeal, and that's it in the States. You are slotted."

I'd made the mistake of slotting him based on our interview, but Hanson is clearly multifaceted. "I'm considered a soft writer, which I think is unkind. Meaning I like some humour and characters and that kind of stuff."

When he was set to work writing the pilot of Bones, he was concerned the studio was expecting a CSI-type show. "They said no, we want your way, meaning soft and squishy. I thought they were lying ... and they were, but not as badly as I thought."

He was instructed to include writers from other procedurals on his staff, and faced battles in the early days over the network's efforts to push Bones further towards the CSI realm.

"They ordered it to series and then there was the big meeting with the network head where they tell you what they want," he recounted. However there have been a few regime changes at FOX since that time, which means the pressure is off to some extent. "The bad thing is quite honestly now we're an orphan. We don't belong to anybody. They'd love to replace us if we could just stop having this 9 or 10 million people tune in every week."