My wife and I like quality television, which does not usually include popular shows. For example, we like:
Buffy
Angel
Battlestar Galactica
Firefly
X-files(for the most part)
Supernatural
Lost
Anyway, would we like Bones, the show that David Boreanaz now on? Is it smart and witty, or just another police procedural show?
We dislike all CSI shows and do not enjoy Law and Order. We haven’t watched House, but don’t have much interest(though we love Hugh Laurie in Black Adder).
We like everything on your list (and not a lot else on television nowadays) and we love Bones. The thing to keep in mind is that, as an informational show on forensic anthropology, it’s a good paperweight. It has almost nothing to do with real science, but if you can look at it as a contemporary setting science *fiction *show, you will be all right. Really, we watch it for the witty writing, the characters, the hawt actors of both genders and many flavors (conventional hawt, exotic hawt, geek hawt, brawny hawt, etc.) and the relationships (though blessedly few romances) between those characters.
Plus, I’m told that I’m a lot like the main character in real life. But I don’t know what that means.
I don’t know about others, but the show’s main gimmick (super-smart Bones is clueless about human nature) breaks my suspension of disbelief. Perhaps it was explained in some early episode, but I just keep thinking, “Okay, so this woman has made it through a lot of school and works with humans, but basic concepts such as emotion and belief are a mystery to her?” Even if she doesn’t feel them, she ought to be able to understand.
Of course, I’ve only seen a few episodes, and they may have been clumsily written. Everything else about the show is enjoyable. It just always struck me as the unwanted bastard lovechild of X-files and CSI.
I hated the pilot. Hated it. Hated the main character. I mean. it’s not enough to have a young, good-looking super genius scientist? You have to make her be proficient in martial arts in a way that she can kick the crap out of men twice her size? And shooting skills?
Why don’t you give her telepathy, as long as you are at it? Or a talking dog? Or a past as a superspy?
And they were so afraid of losing the so important “single digit IQ with ADD” market that they introduced the Holodeck, an idiotic device that makes unnecesary (and unexistant in our world) holographic projections of exactly what’s being explained by the characters. Agh.
So I kept away from the series for a long, long time. But I gave it another chance later, and they do mellow out the idiocy a lot. Oh, there’s the whole problem with what’s FBI jurisdiction and what isn’t, but whatever. So give it… five or six episodes.
I’m really not a fan of the main actress; maybe it’s intentional and part of the character’s personality, but she (apparently) sucks at anything other than looking thoughtful and waxen. It wears thin very quickly.
And as for the whole “I have feelings for you but gosh-darn it, I’m just gonna sit here with my thumb up my ass, shooting you significant looks for the next ten years” romance sub-plot - haven’t we seen it all before, on a zillion other shows?
Admittedly, I’ve only seen a few episodes, and I may have just had the bad luck to score really, really bad ones.
If you were heartwarmed by Buffy and Angel doing their ‘I wuv you, but it’s wrong! I should go away… SMOOCH’ schtick, you may well enjoy Bones. If it made you roll your eyes and think that they both deserved a hard smack upside the head, then it’s probably a show best avoided.
It’s not that she doesn’t understand, it’s that she doesn’t understand why it has to be that way. Everything would be so much smoother and make more sense if people worked in their own self interest, and they don’t, and that confuses the hell out of Tempe simply because, Mr. Spock, humans are illogical creatures. Tempe HAS emotions, she just doesn’t quite grok why they’re useful and if something’s not useful, why is it there? She’s trying to work the concept of emotions into her anthropological framework, looking at them from the outside, instead of experiencing them without analysis. Even when she’s crying, there’s an intellectual part of her that’s distanced, detached, from what’s going on and trying to intellectualize the whole experience.
If human behavior is based on something as uncontrollable and arbitrary as human emotion, then it’s all very shifty and unpredictable to Brennan, and that terrifies her. If she can understand it, then maybe the world won’t seem so unstable. Really, if she were the type to join an internet message board, her username might very well be something that questions the status quo in every respect possible, not because she doesn’t understand what is, but because she wants to know why it’s not something else instead.
…or, uh…so I gather.
I love it. I wouldn’t buy it, but I love it. I started watching it, I admit, out of a morbid David Boreanaz curiosity, but I really got hooked. The fun is in the character interactions. It gets a little less silly with the “I am a bestselling author but somehow have never heard of any pop culture from the last 50 years or your human emotions. They are highly illogical. My books must really suck” crap over time.
I also really like Kathy Reichs’ books, although they’re certainly not the best written. I like the real forensics in them.
I also agree with Zsofia about Kathy Reichs’s books. The prose is a bit awkward at times, but it does have its moments of cleverness, and the forensics involved sounds pretty realistic.
From you list my family likes everythign but BG and Lost. And Bones and House are 2 of the very few shows we like and watch these days.
Some drama, interesting character development, and a good dose of humor.
We got into it the fall before the writer’s strike, then during the strike we rented to 1st couple of seasons.
IMO, this season is subtly different - and worse - than before. The characters are played more broadly - less believably. But what do I know - I understand the ratings are up.
The end of last season - following the strike - was a travesty.
Sometimes the prose is REALLY silly, though. She does that dumb-ass thing a lot where the chapter ends with… “Then I looked at the skull, and what I saw made me gasp.” And that’s it. Sometimes (I’m about halfway through the series) nowadays she tells you at the start of the next chapter, but in early days she’d go the rest of the book and tell you in the last two pages what she saw on the skull. And anyway, I mean, if you’ve ever seen a forensics TV show or read a forensics procedural or know a damned thing about bones, unless there was some wacky skull injury (which isn’t supported in the text - the one I’m thinking of made it kind of clear that it was something obvious to the two people looking at it who had forensics experience but not to other observers) then whatever’s so surprising about the skull pretty much has to be age, gender, or race, and I’m not a freaking moron, so don’t try and make false suspense, lady.
Also, I mean, do you think it’s really THAT common for the forensic anthropologist on the case to find herself in mortal danger on every single big case? It’s funny - some of the stuff that I thought was kinda dumb and laughable in the show that I figured must be drastic departures from the books? Yeah, they’re actually right there. In fact, the show is actually more reasonable about how life-threatening and perilous the adrenaline-pumping job of anthropologist tends to be. At least in the show they have an excuse for Brennan to be investigating with Booth.
Can’t help you with Bones, as I am not a fan of either Deschanel sister, but just thought I’d pop in to recommend that you check out House. Even if you aren’t very interested. IMO it’s very well-written, and off the top of my head I can’t think of anything about it that bugs me. (I like all of the shows you mentioned except Supernatural, which I’ve never seen.)
I wasn’t interested in House for a long time: a genius-but-antisocial doctor? Meh. But then a couple of years ago my mother got it in her head that I watched the show (she’s the one who did) and bought me the first two seasons on DVD as a birthday present. She swore she didn’t want the DVDs for herself, so I took them home and figured “what the hell.” And got hooked. The USA channel runs 2-3 episode blocks pretty often, and it’s become my go-to rerun when I want to watch TV but nothing else catches my fancy (and Tivo is empty).
Rent the first season or two if, like me, you like to start from the beginning with new shows, but knowing the backstory – while helpful at times – isn’t critical to being able to enjoy the show.
In our house, we are big fans of most of the shows you’ve mentioned (we haven’t watched BG or Supernatural, but we love all the rest).
We just finished watching the first season of Bones. It took to about the fourth or fifth episode before I got into the vibe, but then I stayed engaged through the rest of the season, and am looking forward to season 2.
Overall, I would say that the performances are much better than the material. The plots are pretty mundane and nothing to write home about. You would have to suspend your disbelief on a lot of the plot points that hinge upon the “science” of the show. Unlike a lot of the shows on your list, the writing isn’t going to bowl you over.
Back to the performances, that is what makes me like this show A LOT. It’s been amazing to see David Boreanaz expand his acting range from the early Buffy to this. It took me a while to warm up to Emily Deschanel, but she and Boreanaz are a great pair on screen. I love the comic touches that the two of them bring to the roles. I feel like this show wouldn’t have lasted more than one season if other people were playing the two main characters. There are also a few supporting characters that are really charming.
A warning - I believe you can tell to the very instant when the writer’s strike hit and some producer finally got his shot at writing a script. Maybe that isn’t what happened (end of season 3) but that’s really the most generous thing you can come up with to fit the facts. I don’t hold it against the show, but dayum. I’ll spoil it for people who don’t plan on watching the show and want to know just how bad you can screw up a creative work.
See, at the end of the previous episode, Booth had gotten shot by a stalker and we didn’t know what happened to him. Keep in mind throughout all of this, by the way, that what keeps people watching this show is the characters’ relationships, and see it through a lens of “wow, that’s a huge betrayal of every single one of these people.” So the show starts out with what you think, from watching a lot of TV, is a fake about Booth’s funeral - “You know, you really have to go…” and that he’s going to walk in and really they were talking about a wedding or a kid’s birthday party or a fundraiser or something. But no, it’s really a funeral. Except actually Booth is not dead and undercover to shoot somebody. And then that’s over. Five minutes tops devoted to this. The rest of the episode is about how the serial killer they’ve been tracking throughout the season is One Of Us! Gasp! And there’s an explosion, and people you care about are hurt! And people who aren’t hurt are feeling guilty! And then they totally throw all that away by making Zach, who we’ve known since the beginning, be the killer’s apprentice. Even though that makes no sense at all if you think back. Somebody threw a dart at the cast list or something, I dunno. That means that throughout the last few months of the show at least, Zach has BEEN EATING PEOPLE. In fact, he would have had to start eating people AFTER he did the work on the first victim they found, because that’s when the Gormagon got a new apprentice. Now, they could have made it organic - maybe he’s all fucked up after Iraq, whatever. But they didn’t. Just pow - cannibal! And then they totally wrapped up this serial killer thing in the next five minutes, when there was obviously material for a whole other season in there.
That episode in the spoiler box was the first and only episode of Bones I’ve seen and I’m in no hurry to watch another. Does the writing improve after that episode or is it typical of the series?
