Hart Hanson: The Rest of the Interview

The other day, I posted part of the conference call interview with Hart Hanson, creator of Bones, but I am just now getting the chance to post the rest. I apologize for the dealy. Some of your questions are answered in Hart’s dialog here, such as the season 4 premiere date and whether the Gravedigger will return in season 4. Check it out:

Question: So another year, another FOX schedule, another Bones is moving to Friday joke?

H. Hanson: Yes, I hope it is another Bones is being moved to Friday joke. I’m cranky about it on a whole bunch of levels. First is we are a very good pairing with House, and to be split up with them as we were growing bugs me. But I understand what the network has to do. I can see their reasoning, I just don’t like it. And I hope it never happens. I hope we don’t go to Friday. I say that every year, and so far we’ve only had reruns on Friday.

Q: At the end of the day for you, is there a certain pride in being thought of as the show that can go anywhere and do the same solid audience, or would you rather just be on the same night and actually be a massive hit?

H. Hanson: I would rather that we were left somewhere and allowed to grow. We’ve been pretty good at hanging onto the eyes that come to our show. We’ve demonstrated that we do that. That being said is that pride - not so much pride as a Sad Sack gratitude that our audience just keeps following us. It’s gratifying that no matter where we go our audience follows us.

I’ve been told that we are the only show that came back from the strike and went up in viewers, that [our viewership] increased. Everyone else has been down by double-digit percentages, and that’s just our viewers finding us and watching us. So, more gratification than pride, but there’s a lot of gratification.
(click on “Read More” for the rest!)

Q: And looking at the finale specifically, this is going to be the ending of the Gormogon arc, right?

H. Hanson: It is, yes.

Q: And can you talk about what that sort of serialized arc accomplished for the storytelling this season in your opinion?

H. Hanson: 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 for 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.

Q: So building on two previous questions there, what did you want to accomplish with the finale in terms of closing out this season and setting the stage for next year?

H. Hanson: You just said it better than I would, we wanted to close out this season and set up the stage for next year. We’re going into our fourth season, it’s time to make a few changes, to shake things up, creatively and - you know, we’re a murder show. Although we’re lighthearted about it, every once in awhile you feel the necessity to acknowledge that it’s a murder show and it’s going to touch your characters, that world is going to touch your characters. So that’s part of why we did it, the ending that we had.

And also to open up next season, to make a few changes and allow an influx of new blood into the lab. Boy, once again I’m being oblique.

Q: And then let me throw this one at you. I mean you just kind of did touch on this, but at this point Bones is as much of a romantic comedy as it is a murder, you know, procedural type of show. How much of that was planned and how much of that just evolved based on the chemistry between David and Emily?

H. Hanson: 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.

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.

Q: I’ve heard Tom Clancy say that he doesn’t like the movie versions of the books he wrote, where Harrison Ford is playing Jack Ryan, and I’ve read that Stephen King didn’t like the Stanley Kubrick ending to The Shining, and Carl Hiaasen told me that he chooses not to care what they did with the book Striptease because they paid him a lot of money to make the Demi Moore movie. Having said all that, what does Kathy Reichs think of how you reimagined her work?

H. Hanson: 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.

Q: Right. I’ve read a couple of these books. Even the flavor of them is not the same.

H. Hanson: Oh no, it’s just not the same at all. She’s the first to acknowledge that we didn’t get the rights to her books, we got the rights to the documentary on her from A&E, or my partner Barry Josephson got those. So it’s a little bit of a different thing. So for once it’s not like I’m trampling on her characters, I’m not incurring upon her vision of the universe that her character is in.

I just finished writing a pilot based on Harlan Coben’s novels that are based exactly on his Myron Bolitar character, and that was a different kettle of fish entirely. He’s a very, very open, wonderful guy. He really liked the script. But it was a whole different enterprise than Bones, where I basically came up with the character of Temperance and then went out from there and created a television show around her to actually using characters that existed in another medium.

Q: If it had worked out for you to be a metal guitar god instead of a writer, what would the name of your rock band have been?

H. Hanson: Oh my God, I never went that far. The band I was in way back in the ’70s was called Widdershins, which is just horribly embarrassing now. But I like to think - you know, Led Zeppelin would have been a good name.

Q: I know a lot of fans have closely watched the episodes, they re-watch, and they have favorite characters. I’ve been wondering if you’re ever going to address the Goodman storyline again or if you’re going to bring back the Gravedigger.

H. Hanson: 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.

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.

Q: Can you expand on that a little?

H. Hanson: Yes, I can, a little bit. It’s very early days, but I think it would be really fun to do an episode which occurred in alternate reality in which some of these characters, like Booth and Brennan, to be most detailed, were living the life that a lot of fans wishing they were leading. How’s that?

Q: So like married with children, etc?

H. Hanson: Yes, something like that. Something along those lines.

Q: That sounds fantastic. I know the fans would really, really love to see it.

H. Hanson: Yes, it would be fun. And David and Emily are really interested in it too.

Q: Are we going to see more of Brennan’s family coming the next season, especially with her father now out of jail?

H. Hanson: Yes. Those two actors are just two wonderful actors to have on the show, Ryan O’Neal, you know, and Loren Dean, who plays her brother. Yes, we have plans for Ryan. It’s one of the reasons that we got Dad off on the murder charges, is so that we just don’t go visit him in prison. We have ways to fold him into a few stories. So the answer is yes, we’d like to do that. And every actor on the show wants to work with him, which is really indicative of something. The people who have had scenes with him just love it. It’s Ryan O’Neal; why would you waste the chance to have someone like that on your show?

We want to go more into Booth’s family as well in season four. That was one of the casualties of the strike, was the story we had about meeting some of Booth’s family, so we want to do that in season four.

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

H. 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 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.

Q: Was the cannibalism, was that always there too from the beginning?

H. 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.

Q: I also read at the beginning of season four the team is investigating a case in London.

H. Hanson: Yes.

Q: Did you guys shoot on location for that?

H. 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.

Q: I was just wondering, for the next season do you have any kind of like a dream guest start that you’re looking at securing?

H. Hanson: It’s a good question. To tell you the truth, we’ve been killing ourselves to get out the London story in time, and we will start really beating out the next season four in July, when the actors and crew are on hiatus. But, boy oh boy, Britney Spears really gave a boost to How I Met Your Mother, and you can’t help but go, “How do we get that many people to tune in?” I think she’s probably the best person for that in the world.

But early on we wanted to meet Booth’s grandfather, and the name that just kept coming up, because David reminds me so much of James Garner, was how much fun would that be, to have James Garner come and be on the show. That’s always been in our head. And also we want to meet his brother, which I haven’t got the particulars of people we’re looking at, but that’s going to be a really fun part to cast as well.

Q: So are we going to be seeing Dr. Sweets next season?

H. Hanson: Yes. Unless he’s the Gormogon, in which case you won’t. But if he’s not, yes. It’s a good thing I’m not in the CIA.

There you have it, Bones fans, straight from Hart Hanson. I don’t know about all of you, but I am dying for season four to begin!!!

bones, tv, Television, Hart Hanson