Fox facing $179M hit over ‘Bones’

The stars of “Bones” have unearthed a set of skeletons in Fox’s closet.

The network faces a $179 million financial penalty — the second-largest in the television industry’s history — after an arbitrator ruled that network executives “lied, cheated and committed fraud” in order to withhold profits from the hit series, which ran on the network from 2005 to 2017 and starred David Boreanaz and Emily Deshanel.

Kathy Reichs, on whose books the series is based, also filed a lawsuit. The “Bones” cast and crew claimed that they’d been blocked from proper profit participation.

Arbitrator Peter Lichtman explained how some of Fox’s leaders, including Peter Rice, 21st Century Fox president, Dana Walden, Fox TV CEO, and Gary Newman, Fox TV chairman, all “appear to have given false testimony in an attempt to conceal their wrongful acts.”

Fox — which hopes to overturn at least part of the ruling — in a statement referred to the ruling as a “flagrant injustice, riddled with errors and gratuitous character attacks.”

According to court documents first obtained by Variety, “Fox argues that … its only viable business alternative was to pay a $2 million per episode license fee or let the show be canceled,” because, as Fox’s lawyers state, it “was a middling show with middling ratings.”

During the arbitration, Lichtman learned that the top dogs at Fox never made an effort to learn what the show was really worth.