If you’ve had the good grace to steer clear of “Bones” for its previous three seasons, now would be the perfect time to have a momentary lapse in judgment. The two-hour premiere of season four, which aired Sept. 3, shows little mercy regarding explanations of the characters for new viewers of the show. However, after a quick Wikipedia session, you’ll learn that it follows a forensic anthropologist named Dr. Temperance Brennan (Emily Deschanel), and her partner, Special Agent Seely Booth (David Boreanaz) as they solve murder cases with all the mystery and suspense of an episode of “CSI.”
The major element saving “Bones” from being dismissed as a knockoff of the already established “CSI” and “CSI: Miami” franchises is its irregular amount of comedy and intricate subplots involving the characters’ personal lives.
The season premiere, titled “Yanks in the U.K.,” manages to effectively keep your attention while intermittingly playing out a totally unrelated love triangle between two of the forensic members and her soon to be ex-husband. Although it might not sound like anything too exciting on paper, the episode’s series of twists and turns are enough to keep most people from leaving the couch for more appealing endeavors (kitchen, bathroom trip, etc.).
Even though the show’s story line isn’t lacking in the attention-grabbing department, there is one real shortcoming, and it has to do with the characters themselves. There’s really only one character, and that’s Agent Booth. It seems that in the writers’ attempts to disassociate themselves with the procedural seriousness (that could’ve been a made-up word) of the CSI shows, they made Agent Booth extremely sarcastic to, in a sense, be the permanent comic relief character. The only problem is that he completely overdoes it, and is so condescending to everyone on the show that by the end of the episode you’re either still throwing up from having to listen to someone that obnoxious for two hours, or you’re busy finding paper to write down the next episode’s date on. That way, you don’t inadvertently channel surf onto the next one and ruin your carpet even more.
Maybe if in one of the future episodes Agent Booth is killed and his own crime scene investigation team gets to figure out what happened to him (which they won’t do because they all will hate him too much to even do that by then), the series will take a turn for the better.
Show: Bones
Network: FOX
Grade: B-
