Bones Scaled Back On One Of Its Worst Kills, But It Was Still Sickening
The post-event TV lead-out is a delicate thing. Whenever major television telecasts – like, say, the Super Bowl, the Olympics, or the premiere or finale of a super-high-rated reality show – end, something has to come on afterward, and most shows chosen for the coveted slot take the responsibility very seriously. Lead-out programming usually catches hundreds of thousands if not millions of extra eyes since watch parties all over the country get caught up chatting or celebrating and fail to change the channel. Or, better yet, they get hooked on the first few minutes of whatever show's in front of them.
This is how people who weren't even "Grey's Anatomy" fans saw Meredith Grey stick her hand on a bomb in a body cavity, how "New Girl" scored a Prince guest appearance, and how "Stress Relief" was the first episode of "The Office" I ever saw (all three of these episodes aired after the Super Bowl). It's also how, in 2011, a few million kids tuning in for audition week of "American Idol" likely got a little traumatized by seeing someone's head explode in an episode of "Bones."
Bones caused a Standards & Practices nightmare
The long-running Fox procedural series about a forensic anthropologist was gross by design, full of decaying skeletons and unidentifiable remains. But the show also typically stayed in a familiar place on the primetime schedule, one that wasn't surrounded by any shows that could be mistaken as kid-friendly. That is, until the season 6 episode "Bullet in the Brain." In an interview with TV Tango during the show's original run, executive producer Stephen Nathan and series creator Hart Hanson opened up about the series' relationship with Standards & Practices, the network area that's theoretically responsible for keeping content in a show within the boundaries of its rating.
"We feel if we have a lot of negotiating to do with Standards & Practices, then we've done our job," Nathan told the outlet, noting that the show collaborated with a great representative who "works very hard for the show and tries to help us as much as she possibly can." The EP estimated that in the show's first eight seasons, its creatives were only directed to cut back on something disturbing or gory two or three times (including, presumably, in an infamous season 2 bathtub goo sequence). "Another couple of times, we've done it ourselves," he explained, "when we look at the cut, we go, 'You know, even for us, that's a little too much.'"
The gruesome death led to a disturbing American Idol lead-in
According to Hanson, the show's most disturbing visuals came the very first time it was set to go on right after "American Idol," in the episode in which a serial killer who had been terrorizing the show for several seasons (Deirdre Lovejoy) is suddenly, brutally shot on the way to court. "The worst thing we ever did, they didn't stop us from doing, which was the first time we were on after 'American Idol,'" the showrunner explained. "One of our serial killers, The Gravedigger, was taken out by a sniper, and her head exploded." The episode in question was directed by series star David Boreanaz, and by our calculations, it aired just after the season 10 "American Idol" auditions episode set in Nashville. That week, the singing competition series was the number one show on primetime (per TV By The Numbers), while on the scripted front, "Bones" was beaten out only by "The Office."
"It was the first time we were on after 'American Idol,' so there were a bunch of kids watching," Hanson told TV Tango. "Usually, we have gross but ultimately amusing things. That wasn't funny — it was like somebody getting their head [blown] off." As gory as it was, Nathan says it was originally even worse. "We actually scaled that one back a little bit," he told the outlet." As much as I feel for the kids who accidentally saw this, generations of horror filmmakers have talked about being influenced by shows and movies they watched too young, so let's hope a "Bones"-inspired sicko who saw this episode in 2011 is out there somewhere now making the next great thriller or shocking post-event lead-out show.