Make No Bones About It

Bones is a procedural crime drama on the Fox Network. It stars Emily Deschanel and David Boreanez. You might remember Boreanez from Buffy the Vampire Slayer or Angel.

The basic facts of the show are that Deschanel plays a character named Temperance Brennan, a brilliant forensic anthropologist who has the people skills of a fence post. She works for the Jeffersonian Institute, an extremely well funded private foundation that can afford to have the newest toys. The Institute must get government funding and must want to promote good will and good publicity, because they help the FBI with particularly hairy crimes. Apparently Brennan is not your average scientist as she is into martial arts and shooting. At some point before the series began, Brennan helped an FBI agent solve a crime, wrote a fictionalized novel about it and it sold very well, so she has an alternate income from writing novels.

The FBI agent she worked with is named Seeley Booth (Boreanez). He is cocky and impulsive to a degree. Booth was an Army Ranger and a sniper before joining the FBI. Much is made of contrasting Booth's casualness, intuition, and people skills with Brennan's cold-hard scientific outlook and total disconnection anything outside her microscope. How anyone this disconnected from people could write a novel that would appeal to anyone outside an anthropology course is never explained. Brennan's robotic attitude is funny at times, but grating at others. Fortunately it evolves and she developes a sense of humor as the series progresses. The interaction between Booth and Brennan evolve as the show progesses too.

This series is loosely based on a series of books by forensic anthropologist and author Kathy Reichs, and Brennan is kind of mixture of the Brennan character in the books and the author of the books herself. The rest of the characters are new.