Challenging the Crime Genre: An Interview with Bones Creator Hart Hanson - Page 2

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."

Hanson doesn't see Brennan's specialty as limiting the show's range of cases, but rather putting a different spin on the crime-solving aspect. "The whole field of forensic anthropology is really technically advancing to the point where we can do almost anything that the CSI people can do, just with a different set of tools," he explains.

Deschanel was cast after a long search for the right actress to play the brilliant but socially clueless Brennan, nicknamed Bones by her partner. "She walked in and she just was the character," Hanson recalls. "She is smart and beautiful and funny, and she's slightly different. She's just left-of-centre as an actress."

Brennan's parents disappeared when she was 15 — their bodies were never found –- and she ended up in the foster system. "Her incredible drive and curiosity to find out what happened to people, and not to let anyone die anonymously, comes from that," Hanson notes.

Booth, a former sniper, is "a guy in search of redemption," he says. "He has to do a lot of good to make up for what he sees as the evil he's done in the world."

Because of his admiration of Joss Whedon, creator of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel ("he's just a brilliant man"), Hanson was familiar with Boreanaz's work. "I saw David over many years just grow and grow and grow as an actor, and I thought he was a great leading man. An old fashioned kind of guy - Gary Cooper, Spencer Tracy, mixed with a little Cary Grant."

Article Author: Diane Kristine Wild

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

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