'Bones' jumps the shark but still has style

"Bones" returns for its fourth season Wednesday and immediately jumps the shark, then continues on its effortless way gliding like a graceful water-skier along the shore, oblivious to any and all dangers.

No TV series should make it look as easy as "Bones" does, but it does.

"Bones" stars the lovely Emily Deschanel and the hunky David Boreanaz as Dr. Temperance Brennan and FBI agent Seeley Booth. Thrown together as a crime-solving team - matching the scientist Brennan as a "logical empiricist" with the detective Booth as an "intuitive humanist," as Brennan herself puts it pithily in Wednesday's season premiere - they've developed a mutual respect, but more than that a simmering sexual tension that fuels the show's drama.

Over its three previous seasons, the series has fallen back on a persistent tease-by-proxy, as both Brennan and Booth have been wooed time and again by flirtatious friends and colleagues, but all the while they've for the most part remained chastely devoted to each other.

Yet not only does the fourth season premiere, airing at 7 p.m. Wednesday on Fox WFLD Channel 32, indulge in that tired old plot twist, times two, but it sends up a couple of other "Jump the Shark" red flags signaling imminent decay as well. For one thing, it's a two-hour special episode, but far more damning it's a "vacation/on location" episode, sending Brennan and Booth off to merrie olde England.

Somehow, though, for all its hackneyed predictably it remains entertaining and engaging. That's the magic of "Bones" in a nutshell.

While in London to address Scotland Yard and Oxford University (guess who's doing which, Aware One), Brennan and Booth get recruited to work on a "cold case" involving an heiress whose highly decayed body washes up in a sports car in the Thames. This is right up Brennan's alley as a bones specialist - ergo Booth's title nickname for her - and they send their findings back to her colleagues - typically dismissed by Booth as "squints" - at the Jeffersonian Institute in Washington, D.C.

Along the way they match up with their British counterparts, a studly Oxford professor named Ian Wexler (Andrew Buchan) and a foxy Scotland Yard investigator named Cate Pritchard (Indira Varma), immediately and affectionately shortened to "Pritch" by Booth, who has a penchant for nicknames to match President Bush.

Here's the key to what makes "Bones" work: While they're doing a delicately standoffish dance of attraction in London, back home in good old D.C. Brennan's colleagues are involved in a farcical sexual romp. The Figian estranged husband of Michaela Conlin's Angela Montenegro shows up, throwing a wrench into her impending nuptials with T.J. Thyne's Dr. Jack Hodgins. When the hubby reluctantly agrees to a divorce, Tamara Taylor's Dr. Camille Saroyan, who typically rides herd on the squints, decides it's her turn to taste the South Pacific fruit. Meanwhile, John Francis Daley, who grew up from one of the latter group in "Freaks & Geeks" to become a handsome nebbish adult, watches, observes and offers wry comic commentary.

Through it all, in the manner of classic Shakespeare comedies, the side characters act out the passions the main characters deny themselves. That might be a poor excuse for a junket to London, but it doesn't mean it doesn't work as a two-hour TV show.

It also doesn't hurt that everyone has a soft, breezy, effortless sense of comic timing, led by Boreanaz, who mastered the art of dramatic humor as the well-intentioned vampire Angel on "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" and later his own show. He knows he's hunky-dory handsome, even as he plays a reluctant studmuffin, and he also gives Booth his own sense of quirky self-satisfaction, for instance railing against having to drive on the left in London. "I hate England!" he says. "I'm glad we had a revolution!"

That's what makes the relationship between Booth and Brennan so fitting: their contradictions. For all his intuition, Booth is more set in his ways, while for all her logic Brennan is more eager to leap at new experiences, yet she can never quite bring herself to jump on Booth. They get along like a well-matched married couple - fractious, yet loving and respectful - only without the sex. That's the one trademark "Jump the Shark" moment "Bones" might not be able to survive.

In the air

Remotely interesting: Merri Dee is leaving WGN Channel 9 after 37 years at the station to join the executive council of the American Association of Retired People in Illinois. Dee had risen to director of community relations at Channel 9 and managed the station's Children's Charities. She'll leave the station Oct. 1. ... Chicago Media Action has filed a second appeal with the Federal Communications Commission to withdraw local TV licenses over public-service issues and paltry election coverage.

The classic "Peanuts" Halloween TV special "It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown" is out in a new DVD package today, with a list price of $20. ... "The Shield" returns for its seventh and final season at 9 p.m. today on FX, joined at 9 p.m. Wednesday by the new FX biker drama "Sons of Anarchy." The CW's updated "90210" debuts at 10:30 p.m. today on Channel 9, after the baseball game, but screeners weren't made available to critics - never a good sign. The pilot will rerun at 7 p.m. Thursday. "America's Next Top Model" begins a new competition at 7 p.m. Wednesday on Channel 9.

End of the dial: Jock Hedblade is the new executive producer of Roe Conn's afternoon show on all-talk WLS 890-AM. He's worked in both TV and radio production for 18 years in Chicago.

"Wait Wait ... Don't Tell Me" tapes a live outdoor show at the Pritzker Pavilion in Millennium Park at 6:30 p.m. Thursday. Peter Sagal plays host, and the panel will include Paula Poundstone. The program airs at 10 a.m. and 9 p.m. Saturdays on WBEZ 91.5-FM.