Writers lives are not that interesting," Hart Hanson says

Photo: Emily Deschanel stars as Dr. Temperance Brennan in Bones, the new crime drama on Global and FOX.

"Writers lives are not that interesting," Hart Hanson says, though judging from all the evidence, the Parksville, B.C.-born TV writer and executive producer is leading an all-too-interesting life these days. His new series, Bones, based on the novels of Quebec forensic anthropologist and bestselling author Kathy Reichs returns Tuesday to the Fox network (Global in Canada), after a brief hiatus caused by the baseball playoffs. When it does, the forensic thriller featuring Emily Deschanel as a headstrong anthropologist and David Boreanaz as her equally headstrong partner-in-crime-solving, will resume its position as one of the fall season's early success stories with an average 8 million viewers a week, a full-season order of episodes and, unusually for a first-year series, audience growth in its third week over the first two. The numbers, while gratifying, are not what drives Hanson. The one-time staff writer for Joan of Arcadia and Judging Amy who once peddled stories to the University of Victoria's Malahat Review -- Hanson's 1988 novel, The Last Gypsy Summer, won the National Norma Epstein Award -- is having one of those click moments, when everything seems to be coming together. Hanson initially shied away from Bones -- the last thing he wanted, he told his producer partner Barry Josephson, was to write a procedural thriller -- but it soon became evident that this was going to be more of a character study than a straight howdunit. It's about looking at what the case means to the people who are working on it, and not just how the case is going to unfold and how they're going to catch the bad guy," Hanson said. "I told them. 'You don't want me to do a forensic show, because I have no interest in those straight procedural shows.' I told them I wanted it to have a certain level of humour.  It has to be funny once in a while. And they said, 'No, no, we know your work, we want to incorporate that.' "And I kept waiting for them to have lied -- right up until the point where we were shooting the third episode. I kept waiting for them to say, `No, no, you have to do it like CSI,' and that moment never came. "My feeling is that, in grossly simplistic terms, if it's not a third to a half about the character, then I'm going to get bored and I'm no longer going to do it. So far, luckily -- and largely thanks to House -- that idea has been embraced." Bones's cast -- Deschanel, Boreanaz, Michaela Conlin and Eric Millegan -- gelled mere days into production. And the stories, with their emphasis on bone fragments and forensic anthropology, are sufficiently unique to separate Bones from the horde of similarly themed crime series.

Reichs, who divides her time between writing novels and her dual duties for North Carolina's medical examiner's office and Montreal's Laboratoire des Sciences Judicaires et de Medecine Legale (she is also a professor of anthropology at the University of North Carolina-Charlotte) has given Bones -- and Hanson -- her seal of approval, and is now acting in a consulting role. "She's off being a very best-selling author," Hanson said, laughing. "I gather she's doing less and less forensic work, and she's becoming quite the media figure. She's a good storyteller. Her books are doing very, very well. We all have time-management issues. Which one are you going to pick -- poking around dead bodies or writing books? She does read the scripts, and offers comments as much as she can at the time. She's not uninvolved in the show; she's just not here with us, on the lot, in the offices." Hanson remains proud of Traders, the homegrown drama he helped produce for several years in Toronto before trying his hand in Hollywood. "At first blush, so many ideas are bad, and then they go on forever," Hanson said. "Traders was just a real challenge. To make a financial institution interesting from week to week, without turning it into straight soap opera, is a challenge, and I don't care what anyone says. It's a challenge." Hanson is aware of the irony of two Canadians -- and two former producers of Traders -- holding down the fort for the Fox network on Tuesday nights. David Shore, a close friend of Hanson's from Toronto, created House and is that program's executive producer and head writer. "I said to David, thank you for getting us on the schedule. Because his show proved you can mix procedural and character, which is what mine is. He got that genre up on the screen, and then made it a hit. I've never been so happy to see anyone get an Emmy in my life. He's worked so very hard, and he's the heart and soul of that show. It is funny, though. All the Canadians down here tend to know who we are."  

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