Hart Hanson’s forensic procedural runs on a decade of bickering between a scientist who does not understand people and a federal agent who does not understand science. The bodies are absurd and the cases forgettable; the pair carrying them are not.
Hart Hanson’s series has a simple engine: a woman who trusts only evidence, a man who trusts his gut, and a corpse between them every week. It ran for twelve seasons and 246 episodes between 2005 and 2017, which is longer than most marriages, and for most of it the show was better company than a programme about liquefied remains has any right to be. It is a good procedural rather than a great one, and the two people at the centre are the reason to watch and the reason it lasted.
Emily Deschanel plays Brennan as literal to the point of rudeness. She says she does not know what a phrase means and she means it; Deschanel never plays the line for cuteness. David Boreanaz plays Booth as a man who learned young how to be liked and is faintly embarrassed by how well it works. Their best scenes are in the car, where nobody has to look at anybody and both say more than they intended. The pilot pushes the banter too hard, and the first few episodes feel like two actors being told to spar; by mid-season they have found a rhythm and the writers have stopped shouting the premise.
The lab is the show’s second lead. T.J. Thyne’s Hodgins treats every jar of slime as a present and every government agency as a plot, and he made us laugh more than anyone else. Michaela Conlin’s Angela is the warmth, the one person in the building who asks how everyone is and waits for the answer. Tamara Taylor’s Camille Saroyan runs the place with the flat patience of someone who has read the budget. John Francis Daley’s Lance Sweets exists to be told by Brennan that psychology is not a science, and Daley takes it well. Jonathan Adams’s Daniel Goodman holds the early seasons together with a raised eyebrow. Ryan O’Neal drifts in as Max Keenan.
The production design, by Victoria Paul and those who followed her, gives the Jeffersonian a glass-and-steel atrium with a raised platform at its heart, lit cool and blue, so the dead are always on a stage. The cinematographers, Michael D. O’Shea and Gordon Lonsdale among them, shoot the bodies frankly: the camera does not cut away while Hodgins names the maggots. We were revolted, regularly, and the show intends it. A corpse comes out of a septic tank or a chimney, and the lab crowds round it as cheerfully as a family round a Sunday roast. Sean Callery’s score is sparing, mostly low strings under the quiet moments, and it knows when to stop.
The science is fantasy. A skull goes into a machine and a face comes out in seconds; a fragment of femur tells Brennan a man’s diet, hobby and postcode. The cases are the weakest part: the murderer tends to be the third person interviewed. The serial-killer arcs the show reaches for whenever it wants to feel serious are its poorest stretches; it is not built for dread. The later seasons lean harder on the lab family and softer on the crime, and the programme drifts towards a warm sitcom with a body in it.
What surprised us was being moved. The cause was small and recurred: Brennan is told something kind, answers it with a fact, and Deschanel lets us watch her realise, half a second too late, that she has got it wrong. The show is honest about how slowly people change, and it lets the pair change slowly, in ways we will not describe. Most crime series of its era kept the leads fixed and rotated the corpses. This one did it the other way round, which is why the reviews tend to talk about the romance and not the murders.
Start at the beginning, forgive the pilot, and watch two a night with someone who will argue with you about whether love is a chemical. Stop when you notice you have stopped caring who did it; by then the show will have been running for years and you will have stopped caring about that too. It carries a 15, chiefly for what comes out of the chimneys.
