'Bones,' 'Burn Notice' join Thursday battle
Remember the days of "Must-See TV," when NBC dominated Thursday night and all the TV competition ran for cover?
Well, those days are long gone. In fact, given how Thursday is one of the top nights of the week for TV viewership - and one of the top advertising nights with Hollywood movie studios trying to hype their weekend new releases - it's become a real donnybrook, not just "Survivor" and "CSI" battling "Ugly Betty" and "Grey's Anatomy" and NBC's comedies and "ER," but cable dramas like "The Beast" mixing it up as well.
Now Fox is rejoining the battle by moving the popular, if determinedly slight "Bones" to Thursdays, starting with back-to-back episodes at 7 p.m. today on WFLD Channel 32. And USA gets back in the mix as well with the return of the second season of the lightly lively "Burn Notice" at 9 tonight.
What "Bones" and "Burn Notice" share is an offhand ease, as if nothing could be simpler than making an entertaining, successful TV show. Can they compete with shows trying as hard to please as "CSI," "Grey's Anatomy" and "The Beast?" Well, nothing has succeeded in killing them yet.
Not even being moved at one point or another to just about every night of the week, where "Bones" is concerned. The wonderful chemistry and ever-simmering sexual tension between Emily Deschanel's title character, Dr. Temperance Brennan, and David Boreanaz's hunky FBI agent Seeley Booth have made this series a semi-hit wherever Fox puts it. And now it's being sent into the breach on one of the toughest nights of the week (Sunday being the other).
How indestructible is "Bones?" It doesn't just "jump the shark" - that is, dare itself to decay with predictable, cliched plots - it jumps a series of sharks and just keeps on going. Having already gone on one travel episode, to London, the show's time-slot premiere tonight, "Double Trouble in the Panhandle," finds Bones and Booth joining a Texas carnival to solve the double murder of conjoined twins. No matter how many times popular TV characters have run off to join the circus or carnival, only once has it been carried off well, in the Darin Morgan's "Humbug" episode of "The X-Files."
"Double Trouble" isn't quite up to that comparison, but it finds "Bones'" charms on ample display, starting with Deschanel donning a revealing circus outfit to play the lady target in a knife-throwing act with Boreanaz's Booth, who considers himself able thanks to his FBI training. See, they have to trick the notoriously insular circus folk (including a ringmaster-manager played by Andy Richter) into trusting them before they start asking questions, but hey, if you start asking questions at all about "Bones" it has a tendency to unravel, not that that ever matters. As long as Deschanel and Boreanaz are onscreen, just sit back and enjoy; that's the "Bones" way, and it figures to work as well on Thursday as it did on any other night.
"Burn Notice," however, has a little more difficulty jumping the shark when it resumes its second season tonight. Jeffrey Donovan's Michael Westen is a secret agent who's been "burned" - that is, targeted for oblivion and perhaps termination - and the second season resumes with him just having survived an attempt on his life in a bombing.
"Brushes with death are like snowflakes," he says, "each one unique and icy cold."
Usually, "Burn Notice" gets away with hammy lines like that thanks to Donovan's je ne sais quoi, but it defies belief when he's fleeing the scene of the blast only to save a man from committing suicide. Turns out he has a sick kid and is killing himself for the insurance money. Westen resolves, as ever, to use his spy skills to help the guy out.
"From the first day of training, you're told not to get emotionally involved in operations," he says. "But sometimes it happens and there's nothing you can do."
Your Friendly Neighborhood TV Critic reminds you not to get emotionally involved with shows that use such hackneyed devices, but sometimes there's nothing you can do, not when a Gabrielle Anwar is along, in a bikini no less, as Westen's Irish Republican Army-trained colleague and old-time-used-to-be, Fiona. Their smoldering relationship gets a little hotter tonight.
Still, what is one to say when not only does Fiona get into a catfight with another woman, but Westen dukes it out with his self-deprecating pal played by Bruce Campbell? That's playing a little too fast and loose with believability. On that, "Burn Notice" may find that it no longer has what it takes to compete with A&E's almost equally ludicrous, but far more compelling "The Beast" with Patrick Swayze, which has the additional advantage of being shot in Chicago. That's the thing about competitive Thursday TV: Take it a little too easy, and you can wind up getting blindsided.