David Boreanaz

David Boreanaz is experiencing a strange sensation on Fox’s new series ”Bones”: the sun on his face.

Playing brooding 247-year-old vampire Angelus for seven years, first on ”Buffy the Vampire Slayer” then its spinoff ”Angel,” meant the 35-year-old actor did most of his work in the dark and never got to sport a tan.

”It’s nice,” he says of the UV rays he gets to soak up playing irascible FBI agent Seeley Booth on the crime drama (tonight at 8 on WFXT, Ch. 25). ”I don’t have to wear my sunglasses at night anymore.”

The Buffalo native hasn’t left the dead far behind, however.

On the series, Booth is teamed up with Dr. Temperance ”Bones” Brennan (Emily Deschanel) a forensic anthropologist who, along with a crack team of lab techs, helps him solve homicides with clues she gleans from the bodies.

While there was a joke in the pilot about ”The X-Files’ ” Mulder and Scully, Boreanaz hopes to draw more comparisons to another famous TV pair, David Addison and Maddie Hayes of ”Moonlighting.”

”We have the throughline of the procedural,” he says of the crime-of-the-week format, ”but with ’Moonlighting,’ you always remember how they almost potentially got into bed, you always forgot about the crime. With ours, you’re going to remember both. The characters to me are what make this show.”

What motivated the actor, father of a 3-year-old son, to jump into another hourlong drama?

”I really feel like I’ve got a character I can really fly with and really open up and show people things they’ve never seen before,” he says.

One of those things will be his more comic side, he says. ”I think the possibility for that is there, the way he looks, what he eats, how he dresses, it’s the little things that I’m honing in on now with him. Granted, we just started, but I’ve got a lot of big plans for this guy and I’m excited about it.”