David Boreanaz

No Bones About It: My Favorite Procedural

In this week’s episode of Bones, we learn there’s a community of "Brennanites," avid followers of Temperance "Bones" Brennan, that fictional triple-threat forensic anthropologist, crime-solver and best-selling mystery novelist. Add me to the fan base.

As this second season has progressed, I’ve found myself getting more and more attached to this prickly "squint," her engagingly quirky lab mates and her FBI partner Seeley Booth. With clever writing, appealing casting and just enough of the "ick" factor - decomposed victims are the norm that helped put CSI on the map - Bones has slowly but surely become the most purely entertaining procedural crime drama on TV. (My top five, after Bones: TNT’s The Closer, when it’s on; the original and still champion of Thursdays CSI; and the twofer of Cold Case and Without a Trace, in part because the formula of these Sunday dramas invites a more emotional connection to the victims.)

Having just watched this week and next week’s Bones episodes, more than ever I’m enjoying the chemistry between Emily Deschanel and David Boreanaz as Bones and Booth. Their relationship has been strained a bit lately because of her passionate fling with the more laid-back FBI guy Sully (an unusually agreeable Eddie McClintock). In classic crime-team tradition, Bones and Booth needle and complement each other with banter that only barely masks a mutual (but usually unspoken) attraction. Both are damaged goods. Her family past is a nightmare; his sniper past haunts him and led him to therapy (with the droll Stephen Fry) this season.

Those factors alone would almost be enough to recommend this series, but there’s more. The interplay in the Jeffersonian lab is priceless among the lab "squints," and this season, throwing together good-time girl Angela (the terrifically funny Michaela Conlin) and buggy bug expert Hodgins (T.J. Thyne) in a relationship has added some nice emotional resonance to the workplace camaraderie, fleshing out many a scene played out over a bunch of bones. Even at its grisliest, there are light touches, like Angela confronting her coworkers next week to declare, "You know what you people lack? Whimsy. It’s a genuine deficiency." Thankfully, Angela more than makes up for it. She’s good enough to deserve her own show. But I hope and imagine she’ll stay put.

The mysteries are usually pretty good as well, especially this week’s, in which Bones’ latest best-selling thriller appears to have inspired a serial killer who’s copycatting her gross-out plot. (Which involves victims being chewed up by animals, and it isn’t pretty. The squeamish get plenty of warning so they can hide their eyes.) Speaking of her books, there’s a neat in-joke tonight. Listen for a throwaway line in which Brennan refers to her books’ fictional heroine. Still, her career does bring up one thing that strikes me as false about Bones, and Bones. If Brennan is such a successful pop-culture writer, you’d think she’d know more about the culture at large. (She often says, "I don’t know what that means" when someone brings up a popular movie or TV show.) Next week, she continually turns colloquialisms into malapropisms, at one point referring to a "switcha-macallit." It’s funny, but she really should be smarter than that.

But that’s a small detail. Next week’s episode, which forces Bones to confront her happy fling with Sully - "There’s more to life than corpses and murderers," she’s told (oh really?) - offers up another Bones specialty, one shared by the best procedurals: using forensics to introduce us to unknown, exotic customs. Here, that’s an ancient Asian ritual involving the burial of a man’s and woman’s bones together for symbolic afterlife purposes. We enter the case with the discovery of a young mail-order bride’s body, which has been boiled so the skeleton could be complete removed (and the skin is sewn back together).

Ewww? You bet. Wouldn’t have it any other way.