Challenging the Crime Genre: An Interview with Bones Creator Hart Hanson - Page 3

Hitting the funny bone

The chemistry- and quip-laden interactions between Brennan and Booth are byproducts of the show's focus on character, as is Brennan's comical ignorance of popular culture; her catch phrase is "I don’t know what that means." There's also an ensemble of scientists, or "squints" as Booth calls them, working with her, all with varying levels of social ineptness.

Booth: "When the cops get stuck we bring in people like you. You know, squints. You know, to squint at things."

Brennan: "Oh, you mean people with high IQs and basic reasoning skills?"

"The characters as I designed them are very intelligent — much more intelligent than I am — and we get a lot of fun out of that degree of intelligence and their dysfunctional approach to the normal world," says Hanson.

He describes the humour of crime investigators and emergency responders as an inspiration for the tone of the show. "They're very funny people, and they're very funny about things that generally you can't be funny about. We're trying to do our network television version of that kind of humour. We're definitely not way over to where those people are – they can laugh at anything. We have to be a little more sensitive. But we really like that sense of black humour they have as a coping mechanism."

FBI Agent: Look, you're very experienced within your field on bones and such, right? Doesn't your gut say suicide?
Brennan: I don't actually use my gut for that, sir.
Booth: She really, really doesn't.
Brennan's boss: Like all of us at the Jeffersonian, Dr. Brennan prefers science to the digestive tract.

Raising the dead

The comic relief is welcome given the often-gruesome subject matter. But the show also strives to add some heart, not treating victims as simply a pile of bones to be investigated. Originally, Hanson intended to use the show's holographic device to bring the victims to life. Known as The Angelator, after Brennan's colleague Angela Montenegro (Michaela Conlin) who invented it, the characters use it to recreate the crime.

Angela: This computer program which I designed, patent pending, accepts a full array of digital input, processes it, and then projects it as a three-dimensional holographic image.
Booth: Okay.
Brennan: Did you get that?
Booth: Yeah, that patent pending part.

"We thought that would be our version of doing flashbacks," Hanson explains. "We thought we'd be able to see them and connect with them, but it didn't work. It's still very technological. It's a cold thing. It's very good for describing what happened to people, but not showing who they are."

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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