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Bones
2005 · TV series · 12 seasons
Created by Hart Hanson
Dr. Temperance Brennan and her colleagues at the Jeffersonian's Medico-Legal Lab assist Special Agent Seeley Booth with murder investigations when the remains are so badly decomposed, burned or destroyed that the standard identification methods are useless.
3 positive5 negative9 neutralfrom 17 commenters
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18 comments on Hacker News
> I honestly can never understand people who say there is not enough good content on streamers.
What is there that is worth watching? They don’t make anything good anymore: no Seinfeld, no Office, no Parks & Rec, no Castle, no Bones, no House. Everything new is terrible, often embarrassingly so.
It’s as though sometime in the last decade all the talent and skill left media, and now we have corporations and people going through the motions but not actually producing anything worth watching.
You've got everything from an episode of Bones, to the Coen Bro's Ladykillers, to Conan Doyle's Red-Headed League.
It's a popular method, at least in media.
Yeah, Bones is absolutely one of the worst magic-CSI-solves-crimes shows. More or less every episode uses that kind of thing as a premise.
Even the deduction stuff is only because Conan Doyle says so.
Like he could determine cultivars of tobacco from looking at and feeling the ash. And other people never pick up on things that even the reader could. But Holmes does. And then you feel smart, because you even beat Holmes to the punch.
My wife has been watching Bones (again) and I've noticed this a lot there too. It was an episode where the victim was a nine-year-old child. They "digitally reconstructed" the child's appearance and couldn't find a match, but then noticed the hair was dyed, the teeth were veneered, etc. And it's obvious, the child was on the pageant circuit. But they didn't put it together until the answer was given to them. Later on, same thing with a murder weapon. They assumed it was a steel-toe boot, but it's pageant contestants, tap shoes are also available. Etc. etc. And yes, tap shoes were used in the murder.
And there's two reasons for this. This is how smart the writers are. They honestly think this takes significant deductive ability. And making the characters figure it out faster would be implausible. Or. They want the viewers/readers to feel smart. And one way to do that is to make them able to figure out the pieces before the characters. Characters who are the smartest because we're told they're the smartest.
They probably have better data on why they are losing subscribers than I do, and presumably they can see things like an IP address used by one subscription, then that subscription being cancelled, then the same IP address being used by a different subscription. But …
I have subscribed to Netflix for nearly twenty years, since it was a DVD delivery service, and I am very close to cancelling my subscription because they simply don't deliver good content. The presence of the red N in the corner of a video is a signal that the show or movie is probably garbage, and almost everything has that red N; the stuff that doesn't is typically middle- or lowbrow filler content.
Now, part of that is not Netflix's fault: there is a paucity of stuff worth watching in 2022 compared to decades past. There is no Parks & Rec, no Office, no Castle, no Monk, no Psych, no Bones, no light-hearted, innocent fun. At least, none that I have seen. For Pete's sake, we live in an era which managed to ruin Star Wars!
Still, their Netflix original content could be much better than it is; it is still for the most part bargain-basement stuff. Why subscribe to Netflix when I can read a book instead?
It's a losing strategy though, with whitelabeling of streaming services it's easy for a content holder to just stick their stuff behind their own label or play Netflix vs Hulu vs Amazon Prime vs HBO.
Content generation was a good move, but they seem to be pursuing a strategy of trying to always have some mega-hit. This causes them to cancel shows that could grow into valuable content anchors.
Consider "The Office." I'm not going to say that everyone loves The Office, but a lot of people like it and enjoy tossing it on the TV when they are just looking for some background noise or just want to binge something they find enjoyable.
How much of Netflix's content fits this mold though? If you take a look at their longest running shows https://screenrant.com/longest-running-netflix-originals-ranked/ they just don't run their series for very long. On the plus side this means that they can go invest in other series, but it creates series that don't have the same sticking power.
They also seem to have a real hard time keeping quality up within a series, so you can have a show start off really strong with a great season 1, then season 2 is meh, and then they cancel it. I think this fundamentally makes their catalog less sticky because instead of their original content being something you can come back to again and again, it is disposable.
I've watched my fair share of Netflix original series, but where other series have grown to hold a special place in my memory and I can watch them over and over (Deep Space Nine, King of the Hill, {fill in your favorite long running series here}) I rarely find myself rewatching their original content. With 2 or 3 seasons, the series end up feeling like long mini-series, and not a whole arc that you can sit down and enjoy again and again.
And when I compare Netflix today to Netflix of year's gone by, the thing I find myself missing from the external content catalog was more of those "old favorites" of just watching through Breaking Bad again or enjoying the episode of Bones where they somehow scan a computer virus off of a bone and into their hologram thing.
I imagine almost no one remembers, but that show existed. After CSI exploded in 2000 everyone wanted to hit it big with forensics. That’s how we gif thinks like Bones and Crossing Jordan.
In 2004 we got me season three f Medical Investigation. It was about a team from the NIH that went around trying to solve disease outbreaks. It was a nice change from everything else being crime focused.
But it didn’t make it.
I immediately thought of that Bones episode where a computer is set on fire because a bone put into a scanner had some kind of malware embedded in it. The future is now.
Way down in the article, it describes some data that was not included in its analysis but nevertheless is quite interesting, where several people in a restaurant were infected by one other patron.
This is something straight out of a TV crime show:
> As the authors note, the restaurant in question was air-conditioned on the date in question. Using video footage, they were able to chart the position of every diner in the restaurant, and then map their subsequent infection status in relation to both the single infected individual known to be present at the time and the air conditioning system’s outgoing and intake streams. If the primary transmission mode of COVID-19 were by small, sub-Flüggian airborne particles, the presence of the forced air convection might have made the environment safer (especially since “smear samples from the air conditioner [itself] were all [COVID-19] nucleotide negative”). But the researchers instead found evidence for the opposite: “The key factor for infection was the direction of the airflow,” with downstream individuals being most at risk—a result consistent with the thesis that COVID-19 is transmitted primarily through the ballistic transmission of large respiratory droplets.
I could easily imagine that having been a key insight in an episode of "Bones" or "Elementary".
(If you are looking for something good to binge watch during COVID "stay at home", I recommend "Elementary", currently on Hulu and CBS All Access. It's a Sherlock Holmes set in modern times series. They did a really good job of taking many characters and plots from the original stories and adapting them in such a way that if you read the stories you will recognize them and perhaps even think you know what is going to happen--but they have changed just enough that the ending will still surprise you but also be eminently reasonable in hindsight. The stories that aren't obviously based on any particular original are equally good).
Remind me of an episode of Bones
I'd recommend watching this for its entertainment value (perhaps ironic entertainment value).
> "Bones": The Crack in the Code http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2076424/synopsis
I would give up those few titles if that means getting access to the US (or even Canadian) Netflix library. It's also important to mention that those TV series are actually aired on TV in the United States, here in the Netherlands we have to hope that some TV picks up the rights in a few years (instead of airing endless Bones/CSI/House reruns) if it's not on Netflix.
Reminds me of an episode of Bones:
a: These are what are known as "Guidos.
b: (chuckles) Yeah, Sweetie, I don't think they actually like to be called that.
a: But they do.
a: That's what they call themselves, although interestingly, not all Guidos are of Italian descent.
b: Really?
a: While the styles and mannerisms are based on Italian-American tropes, the Guidos can be of any ethnic background.
a: They gather at the Jersey Shore.
a: The male bonding is near homoerotic.
a: The friends or "bros" are more important to them than family.
b: Right.
b: And how do you know all of this?
a: I stumbled across a compelling documentary about them.
a: The anthropologist in me was fascinated.
TV tried this - remember Bones one season how every episode she'd demonstrate to Booth how her iPhone worked? Or on Elementary how Sherlock would flip open his Surface in the john and send an email, while the camera lovingly watched over his shoulder?
Viewers rebel, ratings drop, and directors quickly ban such perversions of their art. Its not sustainable. Will you read articles on HN that are half ads? Neither will I.
> If I was a TV show producer I'd be on the phone to Sony right now begging for two of them - one for the TV lawyers to use on screen, and one for me to mark up scripts on.
Bones. I expect to see this on Bones shortly.
This happened on the 2009 Christmas episode of Bones.
A guy gets forced into a suicide bomb vest and then it's prematurely detonated. The trigger turned out to be a radio signal from a nearby pirate radio broadcaster who happened to be on the same frequency as the bomber's detonator.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1541172/synopsis
Louie is a surprisingly good show. I think I like it for the same reasons I like Breaking Bad and Mad Men, which is it sticks out from the rest of tv (American Idol, Dancing with the Stars, Bones, House, Law and Order, etc.) I think what's nice is that its not just another over used trope, spin off, sequel, trilogy, reproduction--it's original. I especially enjoyed the episode with his mom. The authors arguments are really interesting and I tend to agree with her. There are flaws in everything though.
Ouch. $2 an episode would be harsh for me.
Our cable bill is like, $80 and that includes internet. So maybe $40 of that is for TV.
And I watch a bunch of different shows. CSI x 3, Law and Order, Bones, House, NCIS, Fringe, The Mentalist, Psych, Criminal Minds, Numbers, Law and Order, Lie to Me.
At $2 a show, per week, that'd set me back.. about $110 a month!
Far more than I pay for cable right now.