'Digging Through the Bones' - Hart Hanson Interview

SOME SPOILERS

Digging Through the Bones with Hart Hanson
by Troy Rogers

Bones, starring Emily Deschanel and David Boreanaz, has developed into one of the more consistent hits for the Fox network and it shows no signs of slowing down as it ended its third season last night with an eye already on the fourth. Bones is the kind of series that feels like it could be on for years to come because, unlike a lot of series ending their third seasons, it hasn’t faltered at all creatively with time. There’s nothing stale about Bones. In fact, it’s better than when it started. So, we were excited to be able to talk to one of the voices behind the camera. Creator (and regular writer) Hart Hanson took part in a conference call recently and The Deadbolt got a bit of time with the creator of one of the more intriguing shows on TV to talk about the plotlines that ended the third season last night and look to the next year.


THE DEADBOLT: You mentioned the Gormogon story worked out differently because of the strike. I was just curious, where did that original storyline come from? Are you a fan of the Freemasons?

HART HANSON: No, not at all. The original storyline came – you know, stories come from a million directions. You listen to your studio and you listen to your network, what they would like, and certainly they were interested in a recurring serial killer. When we talked about what kind of cases could recur, really there are only a couple of kinds that can recur on a murder show, and one is a serial killer.

Then we were thinking, at one time someone at the studio or the network was talking about tying into video games as a possibility, so something to think about. Well, the minute that was in my head I started thinking about the Gormogon vault, I mean before there was a Gormogon. It was what kind of killer would you have who had a complicated and mythological, many things to click on, layer. Lair’s the wrong word. The vault. Originally I thought, “Oh, it will be in a storage unit. We’ll open up a storage unit and there will be the Gormogon vault.” Instead we just went very literal and got the Gormogon vault. And that led us to the Gormogon.

Then we knew that we would want to suspect some of our own people of being in league with the Gormogon or the Gormogon, and the easiest leap there was, well, how do you make, for example, Hodgins look suspicious? Well, he’s a conspiracy theorist, and that led down the road to the Masons. And then once I found out that there was actually a secret society back in Dickensian London in the Victorian times that was against secret societies, that was actually called the Gormogons, and they got wiped out, they disappeared, I thought, “Oh, we’ll use that.” And that was sort of the groundwork for the Gormogon story.

THE DEADBOLT: Was the cannibalism always there from the beginning?

HANSON: No, that is a great example of – I’m admitting how you do things on the fly in television – that was as a result of writing the first piece in the Gormogon story, which had a skull coming through a windshield, and one of the clues on it was tooth marks, so it has been gnawed on. All we wanted was a good tease, and then that had to become part of the – when we came back to it. Again, I’d written that part, beaten out that story, and the network responded so much that they thought this would be a good serial killer. So those two things came together. And then I was stuck with a cannibalistic serial killer. It was my own fault.

THE DEADBOLT: I also read at the beginning of season four the team is investigating a case in London. Did you guys shoot on location for that?

HANSON: We haven’t gone yet. I’m doing a pass at the script right now. We hope to be shooting there starting in mid-June. David and Emily will go off to be Booth and Brennan in London. It’s going to be a two-parter in Fox’s week of two-hour premieres. We are August 26th. I think we’re up against the Democratic National Convention, so that’s going to go well. They’ll be watching in London, I hope.

Other Conference Call Highlights:

Hart Hanson on what the serialized arc of the Gormogon accomplished for the storytelling this season:

Well, for us – we’re a very episodic show, Bones is. We attempt to solve the murder. We’re a murder show; we solve a murder every week and hope that we have a few laughs and tears along the way. Any of the serialized stories that we do – we do it quite rarely – are more a tip of the hat to our fans, to our viewers who tune in all the time, because you want to give them a little something extra that they feel rewarded for coming back week after week. So that was the point of the Gormogon story was to, you know, a little something extra.

It was changed by the strike. We had a few more beats to go with it, we had a few more twists and turns in it in mind when we started, but being as we’re very episodic, we decided it would behoove us to wrap it up in a season and not carry it on to another season. What’s the word I want? The culmination of that story is slightly different than we had in mind, although in the end it worked out differently than we had in mind originally, but the end result is the same, if I can be very oblique.

Hanson on how much of the romantic comedy elements between David and Emily is planned and how much evolved on its own:

It was from the very beginning, before it was a romantic comedy, in my mind it was going to be an amusing character-driven murder show. I always thought that because our victims, especially at the beginning of the show, because our victims were – when you look at our corpses you’re not seeing a recent bereavement, you’re seeing something hideous and in a way non-human. Although, of course, our victims are human, it’s just that it’s not as immediate, so there’s not the same rush to solve the murder. So you could have a little bit of humor along the way. So that was always part of the mix in my mind.

And certainly I warned the studio who first hired me onto it and took the pitch, and then the network who bought it, under Gail Berman, that it wasn’t going to be CSI; it was going to be a different beast. When we found David – someone actually, the head of the studio, Dana Walden, suggested David to me, would I be interested in meeting with him. I said, “I’m ready to hire him right now. I’m ready to take him on right now,” because I had seen Buffy and Angel, and I was pretty sure I knew what he could do. I was wrong, by the way. I underestimated him.

But certainly early on, as early as testing for the network, David and Emily had that thing that you cannot manufacture and that you need a lot of luck to put in the same room. And once we wrote to that a little bit in the first season you could see, oh, that’s such a strength to the show, that we, certainly by the time – I think it was around, there was an episode about someone who was eaten by a bear in the Great North Woods, I think we hit our stride there with knowing how funny and touching and how much of a romantic comedy the show could be between those two going out into the world.

On whether the idea for the show was to make a series out of Kathy Reich’s books or the need to find a good idea on which to base a series about an oddly matched investigative team:

I have always been looking for a project that would allow me to do what I get to do on Bones. As in I’ve pitched things similar over the years and I’ve written a couple of pilots that didn’t get done. To be honest – I’ve told this story before – I came to the Bones project because I bailed, I had another project going with the studio and it just wasn’t going to work out and I left them in the lurch. And 20th Century Fox has been very good to me and I felt I owed them a pilot. So they sent me to Barry Josephson because he had optioned actually a two-hour documentary, an A&E documentary on Kathy Reichs. And I did not know her books. If I hadn’t felt beholden to the studio I wouldn’t have done it, because at first blush it looked like they wanted CSI, a forensics show, and that was not going to be my strength.

But as I watched the documentary and felt beholden to 20th, Gary and Dana, that I owed them something for investing in me. So it happened that way. I bent toward the procedural and bent that procedural towards what I liked to do, which is kind of the goofiness and character and humor of Bones, and of course that’s the thing that got made into a pilot, and of course that’s the thing that got on the air. So it was more, sort of like finding David and Emily, it was finding me and this project. I would like to say I did it totally on purpose and had a plan right from the beginning, but really I owed some people.

Hart Hanson on what Kathy Reichs thinks of how he reimagined her work:

I think one of the great advantages we have is that we are not really doing her books. We did kind of an inside joke for Kathy’s fans when we started; it was to have Temperance Brennan, who is the character in her books, in our show she is the person who writes the books and her heroine is Kathy Reichs, for anyone who’s paying attention, although it makes your brain hurt if you think about it too much.

Hanson on whether he’s bringing back the Goodman storyline again or the Gravedigger:

We will definitely bring back the Gravedigger. The Gravedigger story was one of the casualties of the strike. When we came back from the strike and realized we only had so many episodes to do before the end of the season, we knew that we had to choose between the Gravedigger and Gormogon for which of those stories to pay off, and that was a good and interesting debate. But we will do it next year.

We actually thought it was – the reason we chose to finish Gormogon is that, oh my God, that is a very, very complicated back story of what the Gormogon does and why, and just the setup, so to come back next year and re-set that whole thing was like, “Oh, we think our loyal viewers would get bored and new viewers, it would be like a tutorial.” The Gravedigger is a much simpler story, so we are going to revisit that.

Goodman, Jonathan Adams was just always one of my favorite actors that I’ve ever worked with, and I wasn’t happy at having to admit to him that I didn’t know how to service his character properly. To have the head of the Jeffersonian instead of somebody – I always think the best characters exist where the rubber meets the road; they have a function, that is you don’t have to pry them in. So thus, Cam, the coroner, works better for us than Jonathan Goodman, the head of the Jeffersonian.

I would love to have him back in the future sometime, if and when he’s available. He’s a very good, very busy actor. But we’d love to have him come back.

And there is a – I have a slight plan for season four to have, as an excuse, some of our favorite actors from all seasons – I’m being oblique again – to come back for an episode that I think would be a lot of fun.

-- Troy Rogers

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