Fox ends ‘Bones’ chapter, opens one with new ‘24’
Highlights from the Television Critics Association’s winter preview of upcoming shows.
PASADENA, CALIF. Bones has been a mainstay of the Fox schedule for 12 seasons. But all things end — and at the end of this season, so will Bones.
“We’ve had a really great run,” star Emily Deschanel says. “It would be ungracious of us to be complaining about cancellation.”
They could have complained that the last season is a short one, 12 episodes instead of the usual 22, but co-star David Boreanaz says the “12 episodes feel like a full order. We really crammed in a lot.” That includes visits from former stars like Eric Millegan and former guests like Stephen Fry, Cyndi Lauper and Betty White.
Deschanel says they have been bracing for the show’s end. “We’ve had several season finales that could have been our last.”
Just finding the show could be a problem. As Bones fans know, the show was continually being moved around the schedule — landing, Deschanel says, into “20 different time slots.”
But the show survived. “This amazing thing happened,” creator Hart Hanson says. “Our fans, who are loud and passionate, would follow us.”— Robert Bianco
‘24’ AGAIN
24: Legacy producers had big shoes to fill with the departure of Kiefer Sutherland’s iconic Jack Bauer, but they were looking for a different kind of character as the lead in the revival of the popular action drama.
“Jack Bauer cast a very long shadow,” executive producer Howard Gordon says. In developing new hero Eric Carter (Corey Hawkins), “We created in the broadest possible strokes things that distinguished him from Bauer,” with Eric being younger, a married military veteran and not yet a CTU agent.
In the revival, which premieres after the Super Bowl on Feb. 5, Carter, whose Army Ranger team had killed a terrorist leader, finds himself and his former comrades under attack in the U.S.. The 12episode story features characters played by Miranda Otto, Jimmy Smits, Anna Diop and Ashley Thomas, with one returning star, Carlos Bernard, as Tony Almeida. In picking Hawkins ( Straight
Outta Compton) for the new lead, producers said they were looking for earnestness and likability for a character who’s developing into an agent.
Despite Bauer’s legacy, Hawkins says “The only pressure is to step into Eric Carter’s shoes and make him live as fully and as complex and as flawed and as human as I could.” — Bill Keveney ANOTHER ‘BREAK’ After a five-year run on Fox that ended with the death of Wentworth Miller’s Michael Scofield,
Prison Break is coming back — and so is Michael. When the show returns to Fox April 4 for a nineepisode run, seven years have passed and Michael is back in prison. And not just any prison, one in the Middle East.
The Flash reunited Miller with his Prison brother Dominic Purcell as Captain Cold and Heat Wave. Miller says, “Out of that experience came the idea of revisiting Prison Break.”
During a lunch with the show’s creator, Paul Scheuring, they talked about what the show might look like — and whether anyone would want to see it. And as they left the restaurant, Scheuring says, two men stopped their car in the middle of the road, ran over to them, and asked for a picture with “the guy from
Prison Break. That’s the kind of hunger that’s out there for the show.” — Keveney