Bones Needed Three Seasons To Convince Fox It Had A Loyal Audience

The popular FBI drama "Bones" is ranked as one of TVLine's best police procedural TV shows of all time. But believe it or not, it took three seasons for the show to convince its network that it was a success with a loyal audience.

Creator and showrunner Hart Hanson explained to the Los Angeles Times how he measured the show's success: "On 'Bones,' the satisfaction was, literally, the fact that we were booked to be dead before the end of the first season and the network moved us around a ton on the schedule — really, a ton. We never had four episodes in a row without being moved or pre-empted — and yet 6 million people followed us wherever." Regarding Fox's opinion of the show, he added, "I think it was in Season 3, the network realized it wasn't going to die and thought, 'Well, we might as well be nice to it.'"

In Seasons 1 and 2, "Bones" wasn't exactly top of the class when it came to its total viewership and rank among its peer shows, but it showed promise with 8.9 million viewers at No. 60 in Season 1 and a slight rise to 9.4 million viewers the following year as it climbed to No. 50. However, there were a lot of similar shows maintaining much higher ranks at the time, like "CSI: Crime Scene Investigation" and "Criminal Minds."

The show retained and slowly grew its audience over the following seasons, with its season-long ratings peaking at 11.6 million viewers in Season 6. "Bones" ranked No. 29 among its primetime peers that year. It seems that by Season 3, that consistency went a long way toward proving to the network that "Bones" — which originally had a way less interesting title — was here to stay.

That said, Hanson went on to note to the L.A. Times that destabilizing time slot changes were far from just a Season 1 issue. In fact, Fox put the show through the wringer in that regard several times over the years, which appeared to be at least partially a test of the show's audience despite it being fairly unwavering throughout the show's run. During Season 7, Fox took "Bones" out of the coveted post-"American Idol" time slot so the network could attempt to grow an audience for a newer show. 

But "Bones" was a powerful series with a powerful fanbase, and it had proven by that point that the perils of time slot changes were no match for it. "It's just another time that ['Bones'] survived and thrived," Hanson recalled of the Season 7 change. "I was very proud of us, a couple of weeks in, to discover: This is not going to be our death knell." And it certainly wasn't — "Bones" had its series finale in 2017 after 12 epic seasons.