David Boreanaz

Bones is back. The tales of an ordinary best- selling novelist-cum-forensic anthropologist devoted to reconstructing, in the Jeffersonian Institute, skeletal human remains brought to her by Angel from Buffy - now masquerading as FBI man Seeley Booth - have begun their third series on Sky One.

I am very fond of Bones. Partly because there is always pleasure in beholding something that is quite so shamelessly derivative (in this case, of CSI and all 82bn of its franchises), partly because there is always pleasure in beholding David Boreanaz, especially when he is going through one of his periods of not having his neck be thicker than his head, and partly because it furnished us all with one of the best worst lines in TV history last year when new boss Camille Saroyan asserted her authority before a mutinous-looking team (who were planning to withhold vital theories of how various tibia splintered) with the proclamation: "I am a diuretic seagull, people. Everything goes through me." I have been trying to manoeuvre myself into a position of thoroughgoing responsibility ever since in order to use it myself, but so far no luck.

There is also the semi-sadistic pleasure of watching Emily Deschanel, as Dr Temperance "Bones" Brennan, wrestle with a part that requires her to be bereft of humour, social skills and basic cultural knowledge as befits a Serious Scientist and Product of the Flawed US Care System and still be likable, sympathetic and capable of striking sexual sparks with the hunk- a-hunk-o’-potentially-burnin’ love that is Agent Booth.

That she rarely succeeds at least allows plenty of Gothic plottery to rush in and fill the void at the heart of the show. The opening episode crammed in a chewed skull, 12th-century Calabrian artefacts, a cannibalistic secret society, a diamond tooth and tell-tale traces of pink syenite from British Columbia embedded in the gnawed bones. No diuretic seagulls yet, but I live in hope.