Where Are The Adults?

They aren’t voting, they aren’t saving, they aren’t buying, maybe they’re watching television…Nah, since Boston Legal left the air there’s really isn’t anything for an adult to watch.

What grown up could imagine themselves in a dirty bikini, thousands of miles from civilization, in some hellhole, jiggling and sweating for the cameras? Men without razors in filthy shorts exposing knees which should be a felony and all the while scheming to strike a deal with the others of their like and sell out the rest of the tribe. Yeah, that’s adult programming. Even the names spell out the target demographic, Desperate Housewives isn’t for men only and Two and a Half Men or How I Met Your Mother certainly won’t capture an adult’s attention,

And when by accident something makes the air with a slightly more adult view it has to be dumbed down so that the audience won’t catch on it’s not for children.

Case in point, Bones, based on the novels of Kathy Reich, truly adult fair and full of fun, murder, mayhem and mystery, these tense forensic investigations have been reduced to a comic book. Temperance Brennan once a brilliant scientist is now a woman so dull that she cannot respond in a human fashion to even the most blatant suggestive dialogue.

One of the delights of the novels of Dr. Reich is her Temperance has hormones. This is a flesh and blood woman with enough sexual drive to match her intellect. The television would have us believe that someone gifted enough to achieve a doctorate cannot manage even basic social skills like not shocking the family of a deceased person by blurting out some insensitive bit of information. That would come in handy with the degree committee!

Even when Bones does notice she being seduced, she analyzes each heaving breath, correlates all of the physical data and reduces the mysteries of human love to a social myth.

Now I admit I want my way with Dr Brennan, all readers do, we want the writer to scan our brains and make the story end like we want it to. And Tempe really should wind up with Andrew Ryan.

So when Dr Reich sells the film rights and makes an adult version of this story, think about casting Rebecca Demornay as Temperance. I can’t really offer much help with the Ryan character, he’s a guy and being a guy I don’t really care what the guy looks like. It’s an anthropological thing, just like Bones says…