Challenging the Crime Genre: An Interview with Bones Creator Hart Hanson

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.

Article Author: Diane Kristine Wild

Diane writes about boring things during the day, pop culture things by night. She also runs the TV, Eh? website, a compilation of news and information about Canadian television. Follow her on Twitter @deekayw for more random thoughts.

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