Bones Almost Had A Crossover With Another Fox Crime Series
TV crossovers have been around almost as long as the medium of television itself. Before the advent of modern shared universes, they were mostly just a lark intended to goose viewership. When "Adventures of Superman" star George Reeves turned up as the show's namesake in the 1957 "I Love Lucy" episode "Lucy and Superman," it was all a big in-joke and not some kind of serious declaration that Lucy and Ricky Ricardo somehow existed in the same universe as the Man of Steel. Nearly 60 years later, when "Brooklyn Nine-Nine" Detective Jake Peralta (Andy Samberg) crossed paths with Jess Day (Zooey Deschanel) from "New Girl," it was a similar bit of fun ... assuming you could refrain from thinking too hard about the in-universe implications.
Speaking of not thinking too hard about canonical implications, Hart Hanson's playful yet by and large grounded Fox procedural "Bones" likewise crossed over with, of all shows, the network's supernatural crime series "Sleepy Hollow" in 2015. The two-part event saw forensics specialist Temperance Brennan (Emily Deschanel, Zooey's sister) and FBI agent Seeley Booth (David Boreanaz) using their scientific know-how to assist the 18th-century born Ichabod Crane (Tom Mison) and modern-day lieutenant turned FBI agent Abbie Mills (Nicole Berharie) in unraveling a mystery involving a centuries-old corpse. What resulted was one of those perfectly ridiculous crossing of the streams that only come along every so often on TV, like the "Supernatural" and "Scooby-Doo" crossover "Scoobynatural."
Five years before that, though, Hanson revealed the show had nearly crossed over with a very different Fox crime series: Samuel Baum's own procedural "Lie to Me."
That's (not) a lie
Recalling how "Bones" drew from the exploits of real-life forensic anthropologist Kathy Reichs (who is also the author of the Temperance Brennan novel series), "Lie to Me" was based primarily on professor and psychologist Paul Ekman's research in the field of facial expressions and their connection to emotions as it relates to determining whether someone is lying or telling the truth. The show starred Tim Roth as Ekman's sorta-but-not-really avatar, Dr. Cal Lightman, who uses his insights into people's body language and microexpressions to assist various criminal investigations through his private company The Lightman Group. It aired for three seasons from 2009 to 2011, at which point "Bones" was only halfway into its (frankly mind-blowing) 12-season run.
Speaking to Entertainment Weekly in 2010 (just as "Bones" was wrapping up its fifth season), Hanson confirmed that his show had come perilously close to pairing Brennan and Booth on a job with Dr. Lightman. "It's one of those fortuitous things. We'll see if the network wants it and has the will for it to make it happen," Hanson explained. That ultimately never happened, as "Lie to Me" saw a large enough drop-off in ratings from season to season to convince Fox to axe it a year later. If anything, though, this crossover might have almost made too much sense to be that entertaining, so far as the shows' respective genres and tones go. If you're going to cross the streams on network television for a ratings bump, then you might as well go for the gusto and bait viewers with something truly memorable.
You can stream all 12 seasons of "Bones" on Hulu and Freevee now.