Bones Has A Hidden Seinfeld Connection Only Hardcore Fans May Have Noticed
Television as both a medium and as an industry has changed significantly in just the past couple of decades alone. The production of so-called prestige shows, with blockbusters like "Game of Thrones" earning feature-length budgets, have completely blurred the lines between TV and cinema — and, what's more, an entire generation of fans have been raised to believe that this is simply how it's done. But once upon a time, even the most successful shows had to fight and scrap and claw for every inch they could take. That goes double for the ever-popular genre of crime procedurals, which were practically designed to last as many years as possible with the absolute least amount of resources.
Fox's hit series "Bones" was certainly no exception, spanning 12 total seasons and almost 250 overall episodes. But despite constant ratings performances, the show's production team routinely needed to find savvy, cost-cutting measures to wring the most amount of narrative out of whatever allotment of time and money they were given. If you've ever heard of "bottle episode" and other such terms, well, these are the exact circumstances that gave birth to such well-established storytelling tropes. But for at least one episode of "Bones" in season 5, the crew had to resort to even more outside-the-box thinking to pull off the scope and scale of what they needed for a particularly dramatic hour, in which a sudden flood derails an entire subway and reveals a week-old skeleton hidden underground.
In order to bring this opening sequence to life, "Bones" ended up drawing from television history: a reused set from a classic episode of "Seinfeld."
Catching the connection
Contrary to popular belief, not every episode of "Seinfeld" ended up taking place at that famous Moe's coffee shop, you know! The bulk of the season 3 episode "The Subway" followed the main quartet of characters through, you guessed it, the New York City MTA system. (Fine, that episode did, in fact, open in the familiar coffee shop set, too.) This one episode provided stand-out moments like Elaine's (Julia Louis-Dreyfus) uncomfortable conversation about the lesbian wedding she was on her way to attending, Kramer (Michael Richards) eavesdropping on some spicy inside info for horseracing, George (Jason Alexander) risking it all for a con-woman, and, of course, Jerry Seinfeld's run-in with a surprisingly passionate Mets fan ... who also happened to be a nudist.
But that same set, originally built for that 1992 episode of "Seinfeld," also ended up factoring in "Bones" almost 20 years later. In an insightful behind-the-scenes look provided to Entertainment Weekly, members of the "Bones" production team revealed a series of fun facts. One had to do with this surprising connection between the two shows. As an unnamed team member explained:
"The earthquake/flood in the subway during [season 5's 'Bones on a Blue Line'] was partially done in an attraction at Universal Studios theme park. The interior subway car that Sweets was riding was originally designed and built for the television series 'Seinfeld.'"
The theme park reference, of course, alludes to California's Universal Studios tour — the same one that commonly goes viral every time a hurricane makes landfall and tricks countless poor saps into thinking the destruction is actually real — that takes visitors through the fully functioning set. So make that two neat connections to television history. We'd expect nothing less from "Bones."