Early organization, commercialization and weaponization of social media in the entertainment industry: A case study, Bones, season 6 (2010–2011)

Abstract

As a television series, the Fox procedural crime drama Bones is exceptional. Having completed its twelfth and final season (2017), it is the longest running drama in the studio’s history. It is also a pioneer in its interactions with social media, offering a precedent-setting early example of online potential for organizing, commercializing and weaponizing social media platforms. During its sixth season (2010–2011) interactions between fans on social media and showrunners erupted into an internet war which when organized into an analytical model demonstrates the potential damage such conflict can cause not only to a specific television production but by extension to its showrunners as well. This transformative moment in the history of television illustrates the point at which fans who had once communicated individually now had means to connect as active online aggregates and express their views across multiple public forums. This case study illustrates the convergence of social and broadcast media and demonstrates an elemental shift in the interpersonal dynamic employed by viewers and showrunners. Considered in this article are the showrunners’ initial narrative intentions, how those intentions changed, and how they ran into conflict with the expectations of social media fans. Using this analysis and the resulting metrics of ratings, DVD sales and advertising costs, a construct can be formed that suggests the ways in which such a conflict can affect overall audience viewing patterns, impact future projects, and how social media, itself, has become a recognized and increasingly powerful entertainment tool.

Keywords:

• social television
• Bones
• Fox
• social media
• audience
• power
• crime drama
• forensic
• procedural
• connected viewing
• fan communities
• showrunners

Public Interest Statement

Do television showrunners listen when fans talk on social media? Can angry fans effect the fate of a show? An early test case of the power of weaponized social media, currently deployed across a range of areas social and political, occurred in the sixth season (2010–2011) of the long-running Fox television drama Bones. The showrunners introduced a new girlfriend for the lead male character when fans had been primed to expect the consummation of his romantic relationship with his female partner. This was the catalyst for angry fans to experiment on social media forums with evolving weapons for organizing and attacking the showrunners and using internet access as a way to confront and punish them. Although the conflict did not kill the show it did have a lasting negative impact on the showrunners’ subsequent careers and predicted the future use of social media as a potent weapon.

As a scripted television series the Fox forensic procedural Bones is exceptional. An outstanding example of the crime-solving genre now finishing its twelfth and final season, it is the longest running scripted drama in the studio’s history. Translated into 45 languages, it airs across 150 territories on six continents. Reruns of early episodes play every day of the week in some markets and are accessible on platforms like Hulu, Netflix and Amazon. According to Fox Television Group Chairman and CEO Gary Newman, “This is one of the most popular shows in the world. It’s the one I’m most asked about when I travel abroad” (Newman, 2014). Bones is also a pioneer in its interactions with fans on social media with the series showrunners (those given overall authority for creative and production decisions), Hart Hanson and Stephen Nathan, early subscribers to Twitter (Collins, 2009; Hong, 2011). During the show’s sixth season (2010–2011), the showrunners engaged with the show’s fans in an extended, acrimonious and precedent-setting online battle over narrative arcs and character choices. This battle featured an escalating response of provocation and retaliation and actions taken by both sides affected the future fates of the showrunners and their shows.

According to Matt Roush writing for TV Guide in 2010: “Bones is one of those litmus-test shows that continues to test the limits of how far a show can go in trying its audience’s patience” (Roush, 2010). In its sixth season the show found those limits and interactions between showrunners and fans on social media dissolved into what Entertainment Weekly writer Darren Franich has called “a shrill cacophony of endless infighting” (Franich, 2014, p. 12). This transformative moment in the history of television provides an important case study in the early convergence of social and broadcast media and demonstrates an elemental shift in the interpersonal dynamic between viewers and showrunners (Kropp, Personal email communication, July 11, 2015). The broader relevance such a study provides is as an early and predictive indicator of the profound power that the weaponization of social media, its commodification and economic potential, as well as its connectivity and ability for self-assembly can and has had in the entertainment industry, and in applications such as the political sphere and other related fields.

1. Objectives and methodology

One objective considered in analyzing various aspects of this transformative moment was an examination of Bones social media networking as a prototypical model for the science of self-assembly or self-organization whereby people or things tend to form organized structures without benefit of a central architect but with an organizing principal. This particular television show was identified as that organizing principal and the proliferation of fan-generated sites that it spawned was impressive. A second objective was an examination of how social media was used by the Fox Corporation to commercialize their product and sell it to online fans. This was second tier commercialization created not by the owners of the platforms but by their users. A further objective was the identification of tools used by those fans in the weaponization of social media – direct attack, online activism, virtual shaming, YouTube postings – and the extent to which this weaponization was effective or counterproductive. Both outcomes were measured by changes in showrunners’ choices in the show’s narrative and character arcs together with the socio-economic fall-out from negative social media response. Also to be determined was whether or not the impact of such weaponization was noticeable beyond the scope of the show and identifiable in the showrunners’ own subsequent television careers.

The methodology employed was threefold. One aspect was a consideration of the academic work of researchers such as Jenkins, Ford, Green, van Dijck and Rose. Yet social media and its use as a platform for weaponization against selected targets has evolved so rapidly over the last decade that analyzing it from a purely academic point of view through published works can lag behind the quick changes that are continually occurring in its development. As van Dijck remarks: “social media platforms, rather than being finished products, are dynamic objects that are tweaked in response to their users’ needs and their owners’ objectives” (van Dijck, 2014). Thus in addition to an academic and socio-economic approach dictated by statistical methods, a journalistic approach was also taken. This method allowed the researcher to interview showrunners, actors and crew in real time as the show was being produced. Another strategy that was adopted was to sign on as a moderator for the Bones blog website, “The Founding Fathers”. Over the course of several seasons this allowed for interpersonal communication with fans posting under pseudonymous user names. All of these varying approaches helped to construct a fuller understanding of the viewpoints of the study participants and to satisfy the study’s objectives.

2. The battle engaged

Bones is a procedural crime drama based on the central relationship of FBI Special Agent Seeley Booth (played by David Boreanaz) and forensic anthropologist Dr. Temperance Brennan, nicknamed “Bones” (played by Emily Deschanel), known together on social media as B&B. As partners they investigate unusual murders and seek to solve them with the help of a team of scientific experts at Brennan’s place of employment, the Jeffersonian Institute Medico-Legal Lab in Washington, D. C. In 2005 at the launch of the series, its co-star David Boreanaz told an interviewer: “The dynamic of the show really hinges on the relationship between these two characters Booth and Bones” (Boreanaz, 2005). His fans agreed. “Audrey”, posting on May 19, 2011, stated, “We don’t watch bones for the shock, okay? We watch it for the relationships” (Curtis, 2011a). Potential fans of a new show are initially attracted not only to the genre and premise of the material but to the chemistry of both the principal characters and the actors who portray them (Epstein, 2006, pp. 11–13). Superfans are those who boast that they have watched a show from its first episode and many of these frequently form a subset of shippers, fans who invest heavily in the emotional relationship between the two principals and are frequently found on social media (Curtis, 2010–2015).

Primed by events in the first half of season 5 (2009–2010) to expect a story arc following fairy tale tropes that would bring the lead characters (“Temperance Brennan” and “Seeley Booth”) together as a committed couple, Bones viewers were instead presented with a story arc that broke the pair apart and introduced a secondary romantic subplot involving a new character (“Hannah Burley”) as a Significant Other (or SO) for Booth. This especially antagonized shippers whose principal reason for watching the show was the developing romantic attachment between B&B. A viral, year-long battle involving hundreds of respondents and tens of thousands of postings ensued across a plethora of media platforms, including Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and a variety of commentary streams on dedicated blogs. Coterminous with the show itself which began its run on September 13, 2005, Facebook (founded 2004) and Twitter (founded 2006) had quickly emerged as major platforms for social media commentary and the interactions of Bones, season 6, illustrate how early on these platforms were manipulated for competing purposes. With available tools such as Facebook’s like and share and Twitter’s retweet, follow and #trend, information and attitudes regarding the show could collectivize, illustrating Henry Jenkins’ aggregating “stickiness”, and then subsequently spread throughout formal and informal networks (Jenkins, Ford, & Green, 2013). The Fox corporation and Bones production staff recognized the value of commercializing social media for promotional purposes by offering forums of instant interpersonal access to the makers of the show particularly through Twitter. But this access left showrunners vulnerable, exposing them to personal attack by anonymous posters. By exploiting fan network connectivity to exploit the show on social media, corporate commercialization created a window for aggressive pushback by disaffected fans organizing and weaponizing that same media.

According to David Herrin, Head of Research at United Talent Agency, if the conversation about a show online is bad, it can harm the show and reduce the number of viewers who ultimately watch (Thomas, 2013). Although recent commentary in the literature suggests that social media chatter has little effect on narrative arcs or the character choices that showrunners make (Grant, 2014; Lacob, 2010), when organized into an analytical model the Bones case study suggests that narrative arcs did change and that the cause and effect of off-screen, online conflict that played out between those on social media and showrunners Hanson and Nathan inflicted significant damage not only on the show, itself, through audience attrition, declining ratings, and loss of DVD sales, but by extension on the showrunners and their future projects. Season 6 set a pattern predictive of the effects that commercial manipulation and social media weaponization could have in similar if less toxic confrontations on shows that followed, such as Fox’s Sleepy Hollow (2013-), ABC’s Castle (2009–2016) and CBS’s The Mentalist (2008–2015) and Elementary (2012-).

3. The psychology of significant others and the Moonlighting curse

While a pool of writers attached to a procedural television series in any given season is each assigned responsibility for individual episodes highlighting a crime of the week, on Bones it was Hart Hanson, assisted by Stephen Nathan, functioning simultaneously as showrunners, producers and writers, who claimed credit for the arc of emotional interaction between the continuing characters (Hanson, personal communication, October 11, 2011). Two actions by showrunners of dramatic series that can cause great perturbation among dedicated fans are the killing off of a “beloved” character (think Sherlock Holmes at Reichenbach Falls), or the breaking up of the central couple (Romeo abandons Juliet for Rosaline). Showrunners frequently decide to do either or both for the sake of storytelling drama but the timing is crucial. The probability for missteps in such storylines increases in direct proportion to the length of time the show has been on the air. The deeper into the run of a series such a death or break-up occurs the greater the pushback from fans. A corollary of this is the perception in the minds of these same fans that an on-going or anticipated future romantic relationship functions in and of itself as a “beloved” character and damaging or abandoning it can cause those on social media to act out in emotionally-charged ways.

A separation of the central couple is often created by the introduction of a Significant Other or SO. SO’s are limited run characters used as story devices for secondary romantic situations in scripted television series. These temporary romantic partners are intended to add tension primarily to the show’s central relationship or OTP (One True Pairing) and to dramatize the UST (Unresolved Sexual Tension) between the two principal characters. When working with a SO story arc a showrunner must maintain a delicate balance between protecting the relationship of the main couple while creating interest in the side relationships in which they may become involved. If a showrunner deliberately disrupts the central emotional balance with the introduction of a SO, fans can and do take to social media to protest, especially if such a disruption occurs years into a series when viewers have heightened expectations of a romantic coupling between the show’s principals. To maintain fan support and keep viewers watching, the showrunner must ensure two things: that the secondary SO relationship is kept purposefully shallow, short, and subsidiary to the OTP core relationship and that the temporary character in no way overwhelms or replaces the long-term relationship of the principals, two rules that in season 6 Bones showrunners were accused of ignoring.

Over the series’ first five seasons, from 2005–2010, the currents of emotional interaction between Booth and Brennan ebbed and flowed with little doubt either on the part of fans or in the minds of showrunners that eventually the two would become a PCC or Permanently Committed Couple. “Everything happens eventually,” had become the show’s mantra as early as the 18th episode of the second season (“The Boneless Bride in the River”, broadcast March 21, 2007), and “Nothing happens except first a dream” was the theme of the 100th episode (“The Parts in the Sum of the Whole”, broadcast April 8, 2010). This quotation was particularly meaningful for hardcore fans because showrunner Hart Hanson had written the May 14, 2009 season 4 finale, “The Beginning in the End”, as a dream sequence in which Booth and Brennan had become a married couple, and many on social media saw this dream as predictive of up-coming events planned for season 5. Although this had been Hanson’s original intention, toward the end of the fifth season he changed his mind. “[Once] I got the network and the studio to sign off on the 100th episode,” he said, “we knew [then] that we would split them up…[We] needed a season ender that was at least as interesting as our 100th episode” (Roffman, 2010h).

An industry-wide superstition impacting showrunners’ decisions regarding the proposed consummation of their central characters’ romantic relationship has been dubbed the Moonlighting curse, a belief that any show bringing its leads together as a committed couple is doomed to cancellation. Named for the television series Moonlighting (1985–1989), starring Cybill Shepherd and Bruce Willis and created by Glen Gordon Caron, Moonlighting’s central characters became a romantic couple for a single episode and ratings plummeted shortly thereafter. As one commentator has remarked: “[The] problem with the fear of the Moonlighting Curse is that it causes writers to do really, really dumb things that only end up hurting their shows in the long-run … The writers then attribute the show’s problems or lack of critical acclaim to … [their] choice to put a couple together.” (Just About Write, 2016)

While Hanson and Nathan stoutly proclaimed their disbelief in the curse, a nervous network seems to have had a hand in Hanson’s decision to stall the season 5 consummation of the B&B romantic relationship (O’Connell, 2013). But it was Hanson, himself, who claimed final credit for the timing. He was quoted in one interview explaining that: “There were writers who thought, ‘Okay, now it’s time. We can’t hold back.’ Or the network would say, ‘No, not yet.’ And in the end, I can say that I got my way by hook or by crook” (Paskin, 2011). Playing with fan expectations and as a way of challenging those expectations, in the final episode of the fifth season (broadcast May 20, 2010), Booth and Brennan’s still unconsummated partnership was dissolved when they both left Washington, D.C., for separate job assignments overseas. Upon their return in the sixth season premiere which assumed a seven-month time jump (broadcast September 23, 2010) their entire relationship was upended by the introduction of Booth’s new SO, foreign news correspondent Hannah Burley (played by Katheryn Winnick).

Initially announced as a short SO story arc, Hanson soon decided to extend it, remarking in a November 9th interview, “I came into the Hannah story knowing where it goes, but Katheryn [Winnick] is more interesting than we thought, so we [are making] adjustments” (Malen, 2010). This decision to frustrate audience expectations by introducing a SO and then stretch out the Booth-Brennan emotional estrangement over an entire season was in part influenced by the two-year renewal given to the show by Fox in May 2009. According to Hanson at the time: “Being picked up for two seasons will indeed have an effect on the unfolding storylines within ‘Bones’. We may be able to get a ‘run’ at a few things that we’d be guessing about otherwise” (Kimball, Campbell, & Fraser, 2009). Fans on social media believed that given a two-year envelope to fill Hanson and Nathan had decided to push back the timeframe for the Booth-Brennan romantic coupling and impose an extended SO story arc on an unwilling audience. In a 3 November 2011 interview Hanson confirmed that belief when he commented: “My biggest conundrum was whether or not to [bring them together] in season five. By the time we decided not to do it in season five, it was definitely going to be in season six” (Paskin, 2011). But this timeline, too, changed and B&B as a committed couple were not seen on screen until season 7.

Originally signed for a 4–6 episode arc (Confidential, Personal communication, November, 2010), Katheryn Winnick as Hannah Burley appeared in seven of the first 13 episodes broadcast between 30 September 2010 and 10 February 2011. She was subsequently discussed by characters on the show throughout the season until the final three episodes which were broadcast in May 2011 where upon she disappeared completely from the Bones universe. The furor aroused by her presence was out of all proportion to her actual time on screen. Winnick appeared in 25 scenes for a total screen time of 37 min 21 s out of 5 h 3 min 49 s, or roughly 12% of the broadcast time of the total 7-episode arc. For comparison, actor Eddie McClintock, who played Brennan’s SO Sully for four episodes in season two (episodes 13–16, broadcast February–March 2007), appeared on-screen in 29 scenes for 50 min, 33 s. This story arc, however, much as it raised fans’ initial ire, held to the tenants of SO storytelling. It was short-lived, occurred early in the series, and was never intended as a serious relationship, three things that reconciled fans by the season’s end and even elicited some nostalgia for the character (but not the relationship) several seasons later (MI_Bonesgirl, 2016).

Although there was certainly no deliberate intention to re-center the show’s emotional architecture [the showrunners were well aware that B&B “were the draw” (Curtis, 2014)], in the eyes of fans on social media the concentration on the character of Hannah from the first episode of season 6 and her involvement with Booth over the course of the following 13 episodes, including explicit sex scenes rare on the show, upset the delicate balance between the primary and secondary relationships and began to pull the central connection between Booth and Brennan apart. Their continued emotional estrangement and the deliberate shutting down of their former intimacy translated on-screen as a loss of the characters’ chemistry, that crucial glue that bound fans to the show in the first place.

On Twitter “Abby” @TeamBrennan asked Hanson: “When is the heat going to return between Booth and Brennan. That electric spark they had seems to be gone now.” To which the showrunner sarcastically replied : “We were thinking of never having it come back” (Hanson, 2010b). Social media began to suspect that the “adjustments” Hanson was making to alter the originally-planned story narrative and expand the Burley arc were deliberate payback for the mounting campaign of online protests which had begun with the storyline’s announcement in May 2010 and built throughout the summer. This growing anger on social media over narrative choices and the antipathy felt toward the interjected SO, combined with the perceived loss of both B&B’s past emotional intimacy and their highly anticipated romantic relationship, created a perfect storm of provocation and retaliation that played out between a macro-vision of what the showrunners intended to do over the course of the season and the micro-vision of how it was being perceived serially from episode to episode by the viewers.

4. Fan expectations and interview misdirections

As mentioned earlier, Bones social media networking is an on-going example of the science of self-assembly forming organized structures without benefit of a central architect but with an organizing principal. An online fan community is a living organism of disparate parts whose organizing principal for the purposes of this study is a television show (Kropp, 2014, pp. 144–166). The show attracts fans into a voluntary collective which then stakes out a shared emotional territory based on characters and storylines and is electronically defined by one or more websites, blogs, Twitter handles and hashtags, and Facebook pages. Some of these sites, like “The Boneyard” created by the Fox publicity department, may initially be established by the studio to start a conversation among viewers and generate interest in the show. But as the communal organism grows, forces both interior and exterior to the community can cause ruptures that split the singular body into multiple units some of which then reassemble themselves and some of which die. These splits are generally acrimonious.

One of the interesting aspects of season 6 was that several of the show’s most important dedicated websites broke under the weight of fan discontent and on-site name-calling. The blog “Bones Spoilers” was forced to close its comment streams. The blog “Bones Theory” became a battleground, and two other sites which together had several thousand online users between them, “The ABY” or “Alternate Boneyard”, a blog created as a protest against the original Fox blog which had been accused of comment censorship, and “Obsessed with Bones” closed down permanently. As an emerging related phenomenon, rather than passive observers, over the course of the season many of the new or surviving sites became dynamic online activators establishing goals of support or opposition to the direction of the show. Two blogs, “Bonesology” (a supportive site) and “The Founding Fathers” (a more critical site), organized by superfans, opened as new homes for the dispossessed. According to one of the administrators of “Bonesology”, the new website was created as “a place where people who enjoy the show could share their love in peace. That’s not as simple as it sounds, as all of us were refugees from sites where bitterness and anger ruled” (Administrator, 2014).

As originally promoted, even a short 4–5 episode arc of necessary SO pain leading to a promised payoff of the B&B romantic relationship was a story journey not all Bones fans were willing to tolerate. @Okman tweeted as early as May 21st, “After reading spoilers for S6 … I’m done with the show!” Okman, 2010). Online images also began to reflect that emerging anger and an online petition to get rid of Hannah before she had even appeared was launched in August (Ming, 2010). Yet given the level of vitriol frequently reached by anonymous posters on social media, initial over-all fan expectations for the start of the Burley arc in September 2010 were skeptical but willing. Kaley Cook-Wolf’s September 24th reaction on Facebook was typical:

Agreeing with multiple people here… Not sure how I felt about the season premier but am glad [the show] is back. Don’t like this Hannah person, I feel like she’s ruining the chemistry between Booth and Bones. Still in love with the show though, holding out for something awesome! (Cook-Wolf, 2010)

But on September 29th Katheryn Winnick, the actress playing Burley, told the online television news site GMMR that: “if the powers that be wanted her to become a regular, she would be open to that discussion” (Roffman, 2010f), and Stephen Nathan appeared to endorse that plan when he revealed in an October 28th interview: “At this point we don’t know how exactly we want to wrap it up. And even if she does go away, we want to leave open the possibility that she may come back” (Marsi, 2010). This sudden expansion from a short story arc into an open-ended one with its hazy suggestion of a repeating SO embedded for the foreseeable future killed any willingness of online fans to acquiesce in the showrunners’ plans for the season. In response to Nathan’s remarks, “Zee” posted: “[If they don’t get rid of Burley] I’ll jump into TV land and kill the b**** myself” (Marsi, 2010).

In addition to releasing the news about the upcoming SO arc prematurely in May 2010 (Ausiello & Patrick, 2010), so early in the year that inevitable resistance to it had an entire summer to build, fans reading Hanson’s Twitter feed a few weeks later learned that the showrunners were also planning an SO option for Brennan. The SO he had in mind was Dr. Adam Copeland, played by Josh Malina, a psychiatrist who had appeared in season 5, episode 14, “The Devil in the Details” (broadcast 4 February 2010). “I …thought that the audience would have no choice but to respond at least a little bit favorably to someone as warm, intellectual and intelligent as Adam Copeland,” he commented recently (Hanson, Personal email communication, August 9, 2016). Given the response to Hannah Burley, the response to Copeland would probably not have been what Hanson hoped particularly if it followed immediately on the heels of the Burley arc. In any event, this second SO storyline planned for the latter half of the season was ultimately dropped due to actress Emily Deschanel’s pregnancy, and as the season launched the showrunners went all in trying to generate enthusiasm for the up-coming Burley arc.

Instead of emphasizing her role as a limited if significant satellite around the larger Booth and Brennan orbit, they shone the promotional spotlight on her with laser-like focus, framing her as a starring and possibly permanent event played by an actress eager to become a series regular. The more resistance to Burley there was on social media, the more relentlessly she was promoted in interviews that not only hinted she was here to stay but assured fans they would not be able to resist her. “I think the fans will love [Hannah] too,” Stephen Nathan said in a September 30th interview. “They’ll love hating her at the beginning but [eventually] they’ll love having her around” (Roffman, 2010e). From the first this insistence that fans would come to love the character met with entrenched resistance. “Ron” posted: “Putting Hannah into it, gave us all a common character to hate” (Marsi, 2010).

Nor were showrunner interviews going to be enough to convince fans of the inevitability of their future attachment to Burley so in an unusual move a group of the Bones recurring actors were enlisted for interviews focused on the character’s promotion. This flurry of interviews illustrates an emerging commercialization strategy, a symbiotic relationship between showrunners insecure over the Burley arc going forward and t.v. blogger Marisa Roffman, who conducted a majority of these interviews and posted them on GMMR, the online website founded in 2005 by Kath Skerry. Recognizing the growing momentum of fan resistance to Burley, Roffman saw an opportunity to grow her own online presence by addressing the issue and not only conducted real time question and answer sessions with disaffected fans but also seized the interview initiative generating kite tails of comments and hits on the site. On November 15th, Michaela Conlin, who played Temperance Brennan’s best friend, Angela, gave an interview and said tellingly: “I wish that I had more control over what [is] being written.” But she continued dutifully: “[Like] I said, they’re really developing the…[Hannah] storyline…Hannah is a contender” (Roffman, 2010c). Tamara Taylor, who played Cam Saroyan, Brennan’s boss, was interviewed on September 30th and assured fans that: “Cam is happy because Booth is happy…I think everybody’s happy” (Roffman, 2010e). In an interview on September 24th, T.J. Thyne, who plays scientist Jack Hodgins, enthusiastically characterized Burley as “someone who is vivacious and sexy and sassy and smart and has it all” (Roffman, 2010g). On-screen as Hodgins, Thyne is shown in episode 2 (“The Couple in the Cave”, broadcast September 30, 2010) speaking lines written by Stephen Nathan enthusing over Burley’s sexiness. “I am a big fan,” he tells her and to B&B, “I love this woman.” In the following episode (“The Maggots in the Meathead”, broadcast October 7, 2010) Cam and Angela are depicted as admiring and perhaps a little jealous of Burley’s self-assured independence. Even Booth’s 9-year-old son (played by Ty Panitz) was enlisted in episode 8 (“The Twisted Bones in the Melted Truck”, broadcast December 2, 2010) to join in the chorus of consensus that was promoting Hannah as Booth’s new love and an irresistible, ideal woman.

Katheryn Winnick, the notorious Hannah herself, was made available for an extended group interview on September 29th, assuring the public that Burley did indeed love Booth and that their relationship was both solid and “long-term”. “‘I heard that I may be causing a stir,’ Winnick laughed. ‘But I’m excited about it. I’m excited about my character and I hope that [the fans] will welcome me’” (Roffman, 2010f). Echoing the showrunners’ talking points, she went on to say that: “I hope the audience will give Hannah a shot and fall in love with her” (Lowery, 2010). When Hanson was questioned by Roffman about this publicity onslaught: “The promos are heavily pimping [the Booth-Burley] storyline and how much Booth is over Brennan”, Hanson seemed surprised by the question and remarked rather astonishingly: “Who believes that? They must be crazy, people who think it’s over for Booth and Brennan” (Roffman, 2010g).

The orchestration of this rather heavy-handed promotion both on and off-screen of a supposedly temporary character whom social media already despised culminated on November 4th barely five weeks into the season in the episode “The Bones That Weren’t” (broadcast November 4, 2010) when Brennan, too, was drafted into the Burley fan club. Winnick had telegraphed this plot point as early as September 29th when she assured GMMR that the newly minted friends were “both very motivated, intelligent, adventurous women and [that] is one of the reasons we really bond together” (Roffman, 2010f). A confusingly written scene showing a hospitalized Burley stealing Brennan’s sunglasses was the launch for this BFF storyline which fans immediately both disbelieved and detested. “Oon” posted on November 17th: “Brennan and Hannah are NOT friends - the show has forced this friendship in the most bizarre (sunglasses) and obvious (they’re both strong! career! women) ways. Not feeling it. The supposed Brennan-Hannah friendship turns me off more than the Booth-Hannah relationship” (Bierly, 2010). As with so much of the storyline Nathan found it necessary to give a lengthy, convoluted explanation of the sunglasses scene that only seemed to underscore the showrunner’s own sense of confusion (Roffman, 2010b). In part this confusion, continuing examples of which were exhibited regularly throughout the first half of the season, arose from spur-of-the-moment re-adjustments to narrative and character arcs in response to social media criticism. Hanson, who had planned to expand a storyline from the hospital episode featuring Hannah and Booth working together to solve a case, abruptly dropped the idea (Confidential, Personal communication, November, 2010).

Ever the optimist, Nathan chose to ignore the Brennan-Burley BFF naysayers, remarking on November 17th: “I think what’s been the best for us and for the show has been the relationship that’s developed between Hannah and Brennan. They’ve become actual real friends” (Bierly, 2010). He hammered this point home in a second interview on December 1st: “[One] of the best parts of this new phase in their relationship is to see the relationship between Brennan and Hannah. Because that’s a relationship between two strong, independent women that I really haven’t seen before on television” (Roffman, 2010b). Given that from Lucy Ricardo and Ethel Mertz in 1951 through such shows as Charlie’s Angels, Cagney and Lacey, and even Buffy, the Vampire Slayer, not to mention Bones’ own Angela and Brennan, this dynamic has been a staple of serial television since its inception, it was an odd statement to make. On December 8th, Nathan was quoted as saying that: “The relationship that these two women begin to forge is going to determine, to a large extent, what happens between Booth and Brennan” (Marsi, 2010). This misleading revelation, hinting at a storyline that was never developed, was another in a series of fan-alienating pronouncements that appeared in showrunner interviews between September and December as the scope and direction of the Burley narrative seemed to alter daily behind the scenes. For despite the publicity press on this particular BFF theme it was only dealt with to any degree in a single episode (“The Body in the Bag”, broadcast January 20, 2011) and then allowed to die.

The number of explanatory interviews that showrunners were forced to give during the SO arc was out of all proportion to the number of interviews they had normally given in earlier seasons and further evidence of story-telling confusion. This furious spate of expository information, posted as blog interviews and intended to justify the show’s narrative to social media critics, was itself resented. According to “b”: “far too much of that [story] telling happened in interviews instead of on the show!” (Mitovich, 2011). Another poster remarked: “[With] the [Stephen Nathan] interviews and the nonstop attempts to shove the contrived fallacy [of the storyline] down our throats, the fact that SN continually harps on how wonderfully everything’s working (seriously?), I have to wonder if the writers are that isolated and embroiled in groupthink that they believe their own BS and truly don’t understand what the fans are upset about” (Roffman, 2010b). Attempting to justify the on-screen storyline while maintaining control over off-screen coverage, by early November the showrunners had lost off-screen narrative control by losing the trust of social media fans. “Randy” spoke for the majority when he posted: “No one is dumb enough, after all this time, to believe…the writers” (Ausiello, 2011). This as it would turn out was not a small thing.

While rumors of the eventual length of the Burley arc ran rampant, one available online source of inside information for Bones fans, of which the showrunners were apparently unaware, was a website called Showfax (Showfax, 2010). Here pages from upcoming scripts called sides were posted allowing actors reading for smaller parts to learn their audition lines by purchasing access to the pages. Sides appeared across the Bones blogs as soon as they were posted on Showfax and were dissected in detail long before the scripts were finalized or the episodes shot. Speculation about plot points hinted at in the script fragments helped to drive discontent on the blogs. When in the sides for episode 10 the designation for Burley changed from the use of her full name (used for temporary or one-off characters) to only her first name (used for permanent characters) social media noticed. On “The ABY”, 9999 views of sides were logged for the first episode of the season, “The Mastodon in the Room”, while for episode two, “The Couple in the Cave”, 10018 views were logged and 341 comments posted (The ABY, 2010). It was not until the spring of 2012 near the end of season 7 that the showrunners learned about this spoiler leak and took the sides off-line.

Traffic on dedicated Bones websites grew exponentially between September and December 2010. On the soon-to-close website “The ABY”, there were 4,718 hits on a spoiler discussion about the pre-season interviews and nearly 2,000 hits regarding the Brennan-Burley friendship. The most users ever online at the same time on this website numbered 425 on October 13th just before the broadcast of the fourth episode (The ABY, 2010). While traditional thinking interpreted this frenetic activity as a win for the show, David Herrin’s prediction that “if the conversation about a show online is bad, it can harm the show and reduce the number of viewers who ultimately watch” (Thomas, 2013) would eventually be proven correct. Proliferating interviews with the showrunners, whose approach in September and early October had been on the offense aggressively promoting the new storyline, rapidly turned defensive. Provocation and retaliation became the tools used by both sides of the Bones debate. While the clash of accusations and rising virulence of insults was evident on blog feeds and Facebook, it was Twitter that best encapsulated showrunner vs. social media hostility. The studio considered showrunner interaction with fans on social media a key ingredient of their marketing strategy. One media guru advised showrunners: “Keep in mind that you should always make responding (online) a priority, since many consumers now rely on social media platforms as a customer service conduit” (Thomas, 2013). The question posed with Bones was what to do if social media customers began launching all-out verbal attacks. Hanson began to get truly hateful tweets on his feed. “Ask Hanson,” one reporter wrote, “about Twitter-based personal attacks and he’ll tell you about the follower who told him that she hoped [his] dog would die or others who comment on [his] family” (Lacob, 2010).

Angered by the Twitterverse sturm und drang Hanson initially fought back. When @Rosie_not_Rose tweeted: “Brutal honesty - your writing of Brennan lately pisses a lot of us off,” Hanson replied: “Brutal honesty: I don’t give a rat’s ass what you say” (Hanson, 2010d). Another fan, who coincidentally happened to be one of that cherished few, a Nielsen viewer, protested that Hanson was persecuting her for some minor criticism. The response was: “Nope, sorry, I’ve read what you’ve had to say on the forums. Position yourself as a victim all you want, you’re nasty” (Hanson, 2010e). One studio publicist was quoted as saying: “[Twitter] is a very powerful tool when they use it wisely…it helps our marketing efforts… For the most part, [showrunners] know what their boundaries are” (Lacob, 2010). But as the season progressed it became increasingly clear from the confrontational tone of the exchanges that no one on either side of the internet battle knew where the boundaries were.

Stoking the flames of conflict was the increasingly hostile attitude of showrunner interviews. Stephen Nathan claimed that angry fans screaming and throwing objects at their televisions was a mark of the showrunners’ success. On November 17th, he told Entertainment Weekly: “It is my mission to torture the fans … I think it’s the difficulties and the dissatisfaction that propels the show forward” (Bierly, 2010). In a second interview on December 1st, he added: “I think [the fans] watch the show every week to be upset” (Roffman, 2010b). Such comments only reinforced the online perception that both the introduction of and decision to extend the SO story arc were actions undertaken as a form of punishment. Hanson basically dismissed social media altogether when he told GMMR: “[The] internet people are not the voice of the 10 million fans of Bones. They are a very small, vocal, passionate, fanatics. So they have reactions that don’t match the reactions of just the ‘normal’ TV viewer…So I [don’t] listen to the [internet] people, just because they shout the loudest” (Roffman, 2010h). Social media reactions to being alternately dismissed as irrelevant fanatics or taunted as masochistic targets for torture were predictable.

In the midst of all the furor there was still an infinitesimal segment of the Bones fandom who were actually happy with the show. Superfan “rynogeny” posted on October 14 that: “what I’ve seen so far is striking me as just brilliant” (Roffman, 2010d). But vastly greater numbers of viewers did not agree and were growing increasingly contentious with each poorly received interview and the conviction that the showrunners were both misleading and taunting their audience. “I’m tired of waiting through the baiting,” “shakti” posted on October 1st (Lowery, 2010). The impression expressed on social media was that the emotional structures of Bones had been irremediably compromised as they were refashioned to now revolve not around Booth and Brennan but around Burley, with the other characters as greater or lesser satellites. Even some of the actors seemed to agree. When told in an interview that scenes between her character Angela and Brennan were MIA, Michaela Conlin responded: “Yes, I know. Please tell Hart that!” (Roffman, 2010c). According to one on-set source, David Boreanaz, who played Booth and who had worked assiduously with Emily Deschanel to build the B&B on-screen relationship, was also growing increasingly frustrated with the direction of show (Confidential, Personal communication, 2010, October 11). On Facebook “lori” posted : “Note to HH: Once you pop a balloon, you can’t put the air back in it. TPTB [The Powers That Be] imploded the show and that’s it” (lori, 2011).

This overwhelmingly endorsed perception of emotional restructuring destabilized to a measurable degree the balance that must be maintained for an audience in a SO story arc if the writers ever plan to return to the central relationship and bring the fans along with them. According to one regular blogger Burley and Booth had now become the primary couple, the new B&B, while the former B&B had become “the sloppy seconds” (Curtis, 2011a). Every action that the writers had put in place to demonstrate Booth’s honorable intentions toward Burley, social media interpreted as a betrayal of his relationship with Brennan. According to “Annie”, “Booth became a narcissistic monster” (Curtis, 2011a). Things had become so hostile by mid-November that Hanson ceased giving interviews about the show and closed his public Twitter feed (Hanson, 2010a). When questioned about his interaction with social media Hanson said: “I was reading absolutely nothing that shed light on audience response … While I’m delighted that fans of the show think of it as ‘their’ show, that delight doesn’t extend to any desire to listen to them tell me how I’m ruining ‘their’ show” (Lacob, 2010).

5. Presentational ambiguity

Over the course of the season, it seemed to many fans as if the episodes the showrunners thought they were producing and the ones that were actually being broadcast had little connection. In the final scene of the 16th episode in season 5, written by Hanson (“The Parts in the Sum of the Whole”, broadcast April 8, 2010), Booth declares his desire for a romantic relationship with Brennan and she responds ambiguously that “I don’t have an open heart. I can’t change. I don’t know how.” The deliberate obscurity of her meaning was parsed extensively on social media as “I don’t love you” or “I don’t know what you mean” or “If we went ahead I would only hurt you”, responses that presented Brennan variously as a self-sacrificing woman willing to deny herself love in order to protect her partner from her own shortcomings, as a coward unwilling to take a chance on a man who loved her, or as a self-involved narcissist unable to feel love and uncomfortable in its presence.

In interviews with GMMR and later with vulture.com, Hanson remembered this scene very differently. In this version Booth had not only openly declared his love, but had actually proposed marriage, even offering to quit his job to be with Brennan. “He says [I love you], no bullshit…I’ll do anything to make this work.” According to Hanson, Brennan was one of the “three women in a row [Booth asked] to marry him” (Paskin, 2011). Yet all Booth actually said on-screen was: “I want to give this a shot.” What Hanson apparently intended to convey and what actually made it into the script were very different things.

This obscurantism in dialogue, which some on social media saw as evidence that the writers themselves were unsure of the story they were telling, was repeated in a pivotal episode of season 6 (“The Doctor in the Photo”, broadcast December 9, 2010), where after the arrival of Burley, a conflicted Brennan tells Booth that “she doesn’t want to have any regrets”. The scene read more as a reference to her envy of the type of relationship she sees her partner engaged in than a specific statement of actual regret at rejecting him. Writer Carla Kettner, who received credit for the screenplay, explained that she had wanted to make Brennan’s regret more explicitly focused on her earlier rejection of Booth, telling him, “I’ve made a terrible mistake”. Instead, Kettner admitted, the language in the scene was debated and in line with the fan torture trope, “it was adjusted a bunch of times … [and] if it feels a little bit frustrating, that’s because it’s meant to” (Roffman, 2010a). “Holly” summed up the response on social media:

I’ve been reading around the net and hearing from those off the net that Booth’s reaction was unBooth like and cold. Whether that was the intent of the writers and the actor(DB) doesn’t matter, the audience perception is everything … the writers have lost their way (Holly, 2010).

In the 12th episode near the end of the Burley arc (“The Sin in the Sisterhood”, broadcast February 3, 2011), Booth with many longing looks at Brennan, tells her: “You can love a lot of people in this world but there’s only one person that you love the most.” The meaning of this statement became another point of acrimonious contention on social media. Did Booth mean the woman he loved most was the woman sitting next to him, the one that he had once sworn he would love for 50 years, or the woman he was living with and planned to propose marriage to in the following episode? Such deliberate obfuscation of meaning in the dialogue between the show’s seminal couple challenged the characters’ personal integrity—was Booth cheating on Hannah with Brennan or on Brennan with Hannah? Was Brennan betraying her new BFF, as established in episode 11, by declaring her love for Hannah’s boyfriend in episode 12? This emotional conundrum added significantly to the undermining of Booth and Brennan’s characters as well as their core relationship and thus to the frustrations of social media commentators.

Such on-screen ambiguity was compounded by the multitude of contradictory interviews with showrunners intended to tease and engage viewers but that enraged them instead. Before the season had even begun and presumably to stem the rumblings of fan pushback against the SO arc, Nathan gave an interview intimating that Booth would be the one to end the Burley relationship. “[In] the end [it] may be Booth himself who torpedoes his relationship with [Burley]. ‘He forged a new life for himself emotionally,’ Nathan says. ‘He’s moved on, but whether he continues to move on is another thing entirely’” (Marsi, 2010c). By the 13th episode (“The Daredevil in the Mold”, broadcast February 10, 2011) when Booth proves that he has indeed moved on by proposing marriage to Burley, a step that appears to have been unplanned at the beginning of the season, this quote, frequently cited on social media, became one in a series of deeply resented showrunner misdirections.

Another good example of the season’s seemingly endemic presentational problems occurred during the season 5 finale and season 6 premiere. The season 5 finale, “The Beginning in the End” (broadcast May 20, 2010), written by Hanson and Nathan, explains at length that Booth is returning to the army as a sergeant-major headed for deployment in Afghanistan. In the premiere of season 6, “The Mastodon in the Room” (broadcast September 23, 2010), also written by Hanson, seven months into his tour of duty Sergeant-Major Booth unilaterally decides to return to the US and basically walks off the battlefield. Social media, especially those with military connections, cried foul. An honorable man does not just abandon his men and walk off the battlefield for personal reasons. In another reactive attempt to calm the storm Hanson gave an interview to Marisa Roffman at GMMR (Roffman, 2010g).

MR: You had mentioned that Booth didn’t go back [to the army] to shoot people, yet we saw him shoot three people in one scene.HH: Okay, there are so many civilian mercenaries. There are so many civilian contractors over there.

MR: So he didn’t join the military?

HH: He did not join the military. He worked for them. The problem is, David just looks too good in fatigues. But you’ll notice there is no insignia [on them].

Social media instantly countered that this was demonstrably untrue. Booth leaves for Afghanistan, appears on the battlefield and returns home from military duty all while wearing fatigues clearly marked with his name, US Army labels, and tabs showing the rank of sergeant-major. “Does he actually watch his own show?” asked several posters, while another, “DEL061”, complained on June 19, 2011 (Goodman, 2011):

I just don’t understand how the writers of this great show can’t seem to get the little things right? Look at what they did with Booth going off to war. They had his uniform all messed up, had him an Army Ranger, yet, he was wearing a Special Forces tab and unit patch…The small things do matter.

This sense of conflict and confusion can also be found not only in the dialogue and presentation but at an emotional level as well. In an interview on August 19th before the season had even started and addressing the upcoming Booth-Brennan-Burley triangle then shooting, David Boreanaz, who played Booth, said that his character was deliberately trying to make Brennan jealous. “[He’s] going to be like, hey look how great my life is, I’m going to try and make you jealous, look who I have” (Roffman, 2010i). Emily Deschanel confirmed the jealousy theme in a September 15th interview: “I think there’s jealousy there, but [Brennan would] never admit it to anyone else and certainly she wouldn’t admit it to herself” (O’Connell, 2010). Even the studio was pushing the jealousy theme. “Jealousy rears its ugly head in the new season of ‘Bones’,” read a headline the Wall Street Journal (Housley, 2010; Wall Street Journal (WSJ), 2010).

These feelings that the actors described as their primary motivation for scenes they were actually in the process of shooting were flatly contradicted by the showrunners. On September 24th Hanson stated in an interview that: “No. I don’t think Booth wants to make Brennan jealous. He wants what’s best for her…There’s no vindictiveness” (Roffman, 2010g). While Stephen Nathan reiterated this in an interview on November 17th with Entertainment Weekly: “You expect there to be some jealousy, but there really isn’t” (Bierly, 2010). This conflict of interpretation between actors and showrunners was indicative of the confusion that surrounded the entire story arc. The dismissal by showrunners of a relatable human emotion like jealousy in a triangle relationship was attacked by fans who were deeply dissatisfied with three supposedly mature characters all displaying an enlightened emotional magnanimity. “Jmcg” posted on November 17th in response to Nathan’s remarks, “After reading this I have to ask what is [Nathan] smoking? Does he really know Brennan’s character…There should have been friction b/t Brennan and Hannah way before this…What is wrong with these writers?” (Bierly, 2010).

In the same interview, Nathan also assured fans not only of the altruism but also of the absolute honesty of the three characters in their interactions. “They’ve all been honest with each other. The honesty that has grown in this threesome has provided us with an interesting dynamic because they behave in a way that isn’t expected.” Fans, on the other hand, who expected fireworks and received instead assurances of high-minded selflessness, did not agree and were busy analyzing and cataloguing the network of lies in which all three of the characters were engaged. In episode nine it was revealed that Brennan had lied about her feelings for the previous eight episodes, and Booth, according to this analysis, had lied to Burley about nearly everything in his life, his feelings for Brennan, the reason he rejoined the army, his son’s feelings, his background as a sniper, and his gambling addiction. Burley, while assuring Booth that she loved him and was prepared for a long-term relationship, showed no hesitation in rejecting his marriage proposal and thus ending the affair. As posters were quick to point out, if honesty was being promoted in interviews, it was emotional dishonesty that was being presented on-screen.

In episode nine, “The Doctor in the Photo” (broadcast December 9, 2010), the final episode before the 2010 winter hiatus, Booth tells Brennan that he is no longer interested in a romantic relationship with her, that he loves Burley, that his SO is permanent and “not a consolation prize”. This remark sent social media into an uproar (bbmagic, 2011; Roffman, 2011c) and generated an avalanche of blog postings over the perceived implication that Brennan, herself, had now become the consolation prize, the “sloppy seconds”. In yet another reactive interview with Roffman (2011c), Hanson was asked if this were true.

Hanson: We would never want Brennan to be a second choice as we didn’t want Hannah to be a second choice.

Roffman: Are you worried about the difficulties of now convincing your audience that…Brennan is not a consolation prize?

Hanson: I can’t worry about that. Unfortunately there’s the loud people who think they speak for everyone but they don’t.

“Bailey” spoke for the frustrations of most of social media when she posted at the end of the interview: “[This] whole ‘Hannah wasn’t a second choice’ and ‘Brennan won’t be a second choice’ theory doesn’t make sense to me. Someone has to be the second choice” (Roffman, 2011c). As early as five episodes into the season it had become obvious that presentation and perception were dramatically at odds with each other and that what the showrunners believed they were presenting and what social media was convinced they were seeing were entirely different things.

When Stephen Nathan revealed in an interview on November 17th that Booth would propose to Burley sometime in February, comment feeds exploded (Bierly, 2010). Given their plans for a 4–6 episode SO arc announced back in May where Brennan would pursue Booth and Booth would ultimately break up with Burley, it is unlikely that this was the showrunners’ original narrative intent and for many on social media it would finally prove to be a bridge too far. “Bella” summed up the overall response that, “Booth proposing is the end for me” (Curtis, 2011d). Brennan had become “silly”, “dumb” and “robotic” (Hass, 2010). Posted “***” on February 10th: “[What] I ended up hating was [their] making Bones look pathetic” (Bierly, 2011b). Booth, once the hot white knight of the Bones saga, had turned into an aging, diminished deceiver, betraying the woman he loved for a woman he could get into bed and lying to them both. “I’m sure this I love you slut thing is a symptom of [Booth’s] age,” commented “sarah d”. “The show doesn’t ignore the fact that their characters are closer to forty than twenty” (Bierly, 2011b). “You’ve turned an interesting guy into a jerk,” tweeted Joy_D’Angelo on January 21st, “and Brennan into a sad misfit” (D’Angelo, 2011).

Rather ominously for the future, anger was targeted not only at the show’s characters but increasingly at their creators whom social media had opened up to easy access and who were accused of altering the original narrative arc to punish the “haters”. The narrative changes exemplifying this alleged retaliation by showrunners—foregrounding Burley, expanding her arc, having Booth propose—caused a profound negative reaction and by the final Burley episode and Booth’s proposal of marriage, the show’s emotional core had been so compromised that not just for those on social media but for nearly half the general audience as well it would prove impossible to restore it at the end of the season by bringing B&B together as a couple as the showrunners now intended.

6. Critical mass

Less than halfway through season 6 a new factor was introduced into the increasingly confrontational cacophony of online infighting when a number of prominent professional media critics began to weigh in on the SO storyline. These were not amateur social media commentators but professional critics with substantial audiences both in print and online. Their criticism added additional weight to the defiant anti-SO position assumed by those on social media. Robert Bianco, t.v. critic for the best-selling newspaper in the country, USA Today, wrote bluntly: “I hate Hannah and I pray we get a Hannah-free show as a Christmas gift” (Bianco, 2010). D. W. West, t.v. critic for cliqueclack.com, complained that: “Bones and Booth completely lost their chemistry. And it is completely ruining this show for me. Me realizing how much I was hating writing about Bones is why I don’t do it anymore, and Julia does.” Julia Hass, who had taken over Bones coverage for the website, was just as outspoken, writing: “I don’t enjoy watching Bones anymore … I feel like I’m watching the show go through the motions of being what it used to be, but it’s missing the Booth/Brennan dynamic that was its heart and soul” (Hass, 2011). One poster on the online television news site GMMR noted that: “Entertainment Weekly [has] dropped Bones from its [weekly] recaps, which is pretty telling” (Curtis, 2011e). Matt Roush writing for TV Guide singled out the disastrous showrunner interview problem, remarking that:

I wish [the showrunners would] just stop teasing everyone, because that’s where the real discontent sets in. If anyone believed Hannah was the real deal for Booth, that would be one thing. But she’s obviously just another road bump, so it’s irritating. (Roush, 2010)

Roush acknowledged “that frustration and dissatisfaction can be useful dramatic tools” but also noted that there was a time limit on their use and for Bones that limit had run out.

Even showrunner Andrew Marlowe, whose ABC drama, Castle, inspired viewer comparisons to Hanson’s longer-running show, commented:

I think there’s inevitably going to be a point in the show where beyond [it] the fans feel like we’re just jerking them around. I don’t think you can get to a season seven or so without doing something [romantically] because then I think your characters just become brother and sister and the romantic tension goes away. (Roffman, 2011d)

There was never any doubt in anyone’s mind that the show jerking fans around that Marlowe was referring to was Bones. The phrase “pulling a Bones” suddenly became popular on blog feeds. “Drippan” commented: “After reading the reviews, it seems like ‘keeping the main characters apart with stupid/contrived plotlines’ will [now] be referred to as ‘Pulling a Bones’” (Roffman, 2011c).

By the end of the season, Hannah Burley, focus of fans’ ire and target of the professional media’s criticism, had spawned more nicknames on social media than all of the other characters put together, none of them flattering – She-Devil, Barbie, Blondzilla, She Who Must Not Be Named, Blond Bimbo, Blond Q-Tip, Hannangst, Hannag, Hanninator, H-Bomb. YouTube videos wishing her a not so fond farewell were created (TinkonBrink, 2011). In the fan fiction universe, where fictional stories written by fans based on the show’s characters were posted, ingenious ways of getting rid of her were floated. When the press release for the November 4th episode (“The Bones That Weren’t”, broadcast November 4, 2010) came out suggesting Burley’s life might be put in danger, blog feeds spiked with the hope that she would be assassinated by the upcoming serial killer whose arc was then being promoted. Jennifer Utrera Melendez posted on Facebook: “Hannah is killing this show for me…Any chance the character supposed to be killed by the sniper serial killer coming up is her?” (Melendez, 2010). And Raquel Assis added: “Just want that Hannah has a painful death!!!” (Assis, 2010). This focus of hatred on a character and a story arc would prove prejudicial to the future ratings of the show, and the vocal anger simultaneously directed at that character’s creators, a systemic anger that has proven to be surprisingly resilient, would have detrimental affects on their future projects.

In the midst of their aggressively defensive stance, one suggestive hint of misgivings over the direction of the season by the showrunners surfaced in a scene between Brennan and Angela written and shot in December for the final Burley episode broadcast in February (“The Daredevil in the Mold”, broadcast February 10, 2011). When Brennan asks Angela if she is jealous of her friendship with Hannah, Angela acts as the voice of the social media audience, replying: “I wish she didn’t exist…I hate Hannah. I wish she would go away” (Lopata, 2011). This scene only became available with the release of the season DVD in the fall of 2011 but that such a scene was even written is surprising; unsurprisingly, it was cut before the episode aired. This excision may have been another miscalculation as the entire comment stream after the scene was posted on YouTube agreed with “SeulementMoi101”, who protested: “I would’ve hated Hannah LESS if this scene had aired!!!! It annoyed me so much that they made EVERYONE love her” (SeulementMoi101, 2011). On June 22, 2011, a false newspaper story appeared on “The Founding Fathers”, a dedicated Bones website, reading: “A murder has recently taken place inside the fictional universe, the victim, identified as Hannah Burley was found in a shallow grave” (Beliskner, 2011). The story was dedicated to all those who “had survived the nightmare that was Bones season 6” (Okman, 2011).

7. Statistical metrics

Despite vicious postings and virulent battles on social media which began in mid-May 2010 with the announcement of the upcoming SO arc, by the time the first episode of season 6 debuted on September 23rd, its ratings were in line with the last half of season 5. The overall season average for the 5th season (2009–2010) was 3.1/9.0 (a 3.1 share of the coveted 18–49 age demographic and 9 million total viewers), with the final eight episodes having an average rating of 2.8/9.16 (Andreeva, 2010). The ratings for the first episode of season 6 were 2.7/9.79 (Seidman, 2010). By December 9th, when the ninth episode aired, ratings had fallen to 2.2/8.36, a significant loss of 5/10’s in the demographic and 1.43 million in total viewers (Gorman, 2010). Rather tellingly this reflected the reactions not simply of those on social media but of the entire Bones audience. How much of this decline was in reaction to the storyline is impossible to say, but that there had been a quantifiable, negative impact was apparent. Seeking to protect the show which was now preparing to film the final Burley episode that would not be aired until the following February, Fox repositioned Bones on its winter 2011 schedule, moving it from Thursdays at 8:00 pm to Thursdays at 9:00 pm with the network’s top performing reality show American Idol as its 8:00 pm lead-in. Fox no doubt hoped that the 20-million + viewers who were expected to tune in to Idol would stay around to watch Bones (Ellison, 2014, p. 91, 94).

An additional plus for the network was that the Idol audience skewed younger with a 7+ share among the targeted demographic age group of 18–49. These efforts to raise the number of viewers for Bones while lowering the show’s cumulative viewing age were temporarily successful. Bones’ ratings jumped from 2.2/8.36 on December 9th to 3.5/10.55 on January 20th, their first post-Idol broadcast (Gorman, 2011e). Over the course of the season’s final 14 episodes, all buoyed by the Idol lead-in, ratings averaged 3.3/10.76. Unfortunately in the half-hour ratings break-downs posted for the April 14th and April 28th episodes, Bones was shown to be losing viewers over the course of the hour [from 3.9/12.76 to 3.5/11.10 on April 14th (Gorman, 2011d) and from 3.0/10.59 to 2.6/9.03 on April 28th (Gorman, 2011c)]. By the season’s final episode which aired on May 19th, ratings had dropped to 3.2/9.83 losing half of the American Idol audience (Seidman, 2011b), with the final ratings for the 2010–2011 season averaging 3.0/10.09, lower in the demographic than season 5 (Kimball, Campbell, & Fraser, 2012).

Quoting ratings, focus groups, and selected blog postings the showrunners doggedly defended their narrative choices in season 6. In an interview on February 10th at the long-awaited end of the SO arc, Nathan revived the torture trope: “[We] drove a lot of loyal fans crazy. They were angry that Hannah was on the show. Some of them hated it, but I think they loved hating it” (Mitovich, 2011). He echoed this in a follow-up interview:

I really do believe that for as many people who are hollering about [Hannah], there are just as many who loved having Hannah on the show and loved having that complication. While they might have been frustrated with that story, they enjoyed that frustration because they wanted it to change.

Nathan’s rational seemed to be that fans loved being tortured because if felt so good when it stopped. When asked whether fans might now expect some B&B action, he replied: “If they jump right back into their old relationship, it wouldn’t be real. Then the whole thing with Hannah was a lie. And if that’s the case, then you can’t trust anything that happens emotionally with these characters” (Bierly, 2011a).

This, as it turned out, was exactly the problem that the show now faced going into season 7. Those on social media had no doubt that the whole SO arc had been a lie, a punishment forced on them by a combination of Fox’s two-year renewal of the series, the showrunners’ infatuation with their new character, their animus toward discontented fans, and the network’s fear of the Moonlighting curse. Ironically in later seasons Bones showrunners would be able to point to the fact that it was their show that had finally broken the curse by ultimately putting Booth and Brennan together in the final scene of the final episode of the season. But season 6, so far as the majority of posters on social media were concerned, was designed not to entertain but to torture and they had been the victims. A sizeable segment no longer felt any loyalty toward the show or trusted its creators.

Nor did the momentary uptick in the 18–49 demographic generated by the Idol lead-in survive into season 7. When the first episode of season 7 premiered on November 3, 2011, its ratings were commensurate with the finale of season 6, 3.3/10.02 (Seidman, 2011a). Again Fox attempted to position Bones with a guaranteed lead-in by scheduling it at 9:00 pm on Thursdays after their new reality show The X Factor. Given the optimistic network expectations for the new show, the numbers for X Factor were disappointing, with their September premiere garnering only 4.4/12.05 (Gorman, 2011b; Keveney, 2011). By the time Bones joined it on November 3rd, ratings had dipped to 3.7/11.64 leaving little for Bones to pick up (Seidman, 2011a). The numbers for the reality show continued to slide. In the final ratings for the last tandem broadcast of the two shows on December 8, 2011, X Factor pulled ratings of 2.9/9.84 and Bones 2.4/8.11 (Gorman, 2011a). By the final episode of Bones season 7 on May 14, 2012, ratings had dropped to 1.9/7.21 (Bibel, 2012), with a 2.4/8.07 average for the season (Kimball et al., 2012), 7/10’s and 1.0 million lower than season 5 and 6/10’s and 2.02 million lower than season 6. In other words the brief blip of American Idol’s artificially inflated numbers generated in season 6 had no impact on ratings going forward into the following season.

Yet when season 6 ended on May 19, 2011, the initial statistical metrics of the fallout from the year-long conflict on social media at first allowed the network and the showrunners to claim victory over the noisy fanatics. An advertiser-friendly show historically under attack by critics and viewers for its aggressive use of on-screen corporate product placement (Bianco, 2009), the network benefited substantially from the perceived success of the season. Advertising revenue rates for a 30-second commercial on Bones rose from $145,700 in 2011 to $166,247 in 2012 (Cultra, 2011, 2012). For platforms hosting the online commentary of an angry social media there were economic benefits as well, as fandom rage translated into an upsurge of online hits and clicks, expanded user bases, extended comment streams and increased advertising cash flow for the platform. The website GMMR was particularly adept at exploiting this aspect of the market through its numerous inflammatory interviews with Hanson and Nathan between August 2010 and February 2011. For the showrunners, themselves, season 6 had provided the highest ratings the show would ever see. Even though the arc of numbers ultimately curved downward, they could and did point to it as a great success. Hanson, who had returned to the interview arena, stated on June 8th that: “[This season] was the most hated and the most loved by some of the fans. It was a long year.” When asked if there was anything he would have done differently, he replied: “Did you see the ratings? No, I don’t regret a thing. It was a good season…a contentious season is a good season” (Roffman, 2011a). That the battle had left scars he admitted when he announced in April that he was moving away from shows with Bones-style romantic relationships: “I’d really like to avoid doing another will-they-or-won’t-they series” (Brown, 2011).

But for Hanson as well as for angry former fans of the show it was not going to be that easy to move on. The showrunner’s scars were on full display in front of an audience of several hundred people on May 9, 2011, during a Bones panel at Paley Fest in Los Angeles. Moderator and online critic Michael Ausiello read a question from a viewer named Andrea reiterating the dissatisfaction of the fans with season 6 and asking about the choices the showrunners had made. Hanson responded angrily: “Blow me, Andrea. Anyone who says ‘the fans’ is full of shit. There’s no such thing as the fans. I’ve had it with this crap … You are narcissistic, solipsistic fools … Andrea can blow me. I’m sick of Andrea.” Although Hanson’s anger mirrored the abuse he received online daily from posters, the outburst became public property when it was quickly uploaded to YouTube (Hanson, 2011) exploiting social media’s rapidly evolving weapon of virtual public shaming (Jacquet, 2015; Ronson, 2015).

It would appear that this now permanently uploaded public outburst gave the network pause. Fox routinely scheduled a Bones panel at the annual entertainment extravaganza, Comic-Con, held in July at the San Diego Convention Center and attended by over 130,000 fans. Comic-Con was and is a major advertising venue for television not only among attendees but because of the heavy coverage given to it by the professional media. Fox maintains a large presence at Comic-Con and in 2011 had 11 shows scheduled for attendance. A Bones panel had been announced for Friday, July 22, but after the Paley performance, the network pulled the panel just two days before the event (Ocasio, 2011). It was announced that the show’s co-stars, Emily Deschanel and David Boreanaz, suddenly found they could not attend but as Boreanaz had already been tweeting about being there and as the panel was scheduled for a work day when both actors should have been available, a more likely explanation for the cancellation was that after the Paley performance the network feared a confrontation between showrunners and audience that could have unfortunate and viral online repercussions (Goldberg, 2011).

8. Continuing consequences

This acrimony between showrunners and social media continued into the fall of 2011 with the beginning of Bones season 7. Fans who had stuck around through the SO arc hoping for some sort of cathartic closure or dramatic resolution in the premiere of the new season, some sort of confrontation or explanation or reassurance that the Booth-Burley relationship had indeed been a lie and the Booth-Brennan relationship was the real deal were to be disappointed. The showrunners deliberately avoided all of this with a series of casual explanations in successive interviews leading into the new season. “[Booth and Brennan] have always loved each other. The audience has always known that,” Stephen Nathan remarked. “We don’t want to see them buying flowers and [enjoying] candlelit dinners. That’s not what the show is [about]” (Bryant, 2011), adding, “I think what we really wanted to avoid more than anything was [showing] a couple madly in love with each other” (Vogt, 2011).

Having spent the previous season insisting both on-screen and off that Burley was not a consolation prize and that Booth and Hannah were “a couple madly in love”, this dismissive attitude toward the show’s core couple and their badly battered relationship was hard for fans to accept. Having witnessed intimate scenes showing Booth and Burley having sex, discussing children, and enjoying candlelit dinners, the promise to strip all romantic encounters, even a confirmation of their continuing sexual attraction, out of the new B&B relationship was roundly condemned on social media. “CConway1982” posted: “I didn’t invest in all of these seasons for them to skip things that actually are important…I just feel robbed.” “Ellie B” asked: “My question…[after this] will anyone care?” (Bryant, 2011).

Despite Nathan’s assurances that Hannah would be back, the Booth-Burley affair was never mentioned again. The final discussion of Burley had occurred in episode 20 of the previous season (“The Pinocchio in the Planter”, broadcast April 28, 2011) in a brief conversation between Booth and Brennan that once again stressed confusion over clarity:

Booth: Do you remember when I broke up with Hannah?

Brennan: Of course that was very recently.

Booth: I didn’t lie to you I just didn’t tell you how much it meant to me that you were there for me. It meant the world to me….

Brennan: Why is it so difficult to tell me something I already know?

Booth: It’s hard to explain.

Brennan: Some things are better left unsaid.

Booth (clicking beer bottles with Brennan): To things that we don’t say.

For Bones GMMR critic Sarah Curtis and for those still watching this was not enough. “[Some] things might be better off never mentioned again (starts with H, ends with “annah”), [but] there are still PLENTY of things that do need to be said.” “JJ” responded: “total cop out from writers unwilling to address the issues or unable to write meaningful dialogue”, and “Parsely” posted: “How can Booth confess anything meaningful to Bones when viewers don’t know what he’s realized or confessed to himself.” “It seems,” summarized “@chibi_tati”, “[as if] we are going nowhere here” (Curtis, 2011b).

Having finally moved on from the loathed Burley arc with its confusing epitaph in episode 20, the showrunners, despite previous protestations, were not planning to revisit it again. After all that had been said in multiple interviews about Burley’s continued presence on the show, this in itself was a tacit admission of the storyline’s failure. The show had turned a new plot page and those still stuck on the previous chapter were to find no dramatic closure. “On Bones,” Hanson explained “we got to replace that unresolved sexual tension with something else that is unresolved, which is how do they deal with having a child together?” (Paskin, 2011). Logically, argued fans, B&B UST had to be resolved long enough to produce a child, something that was never explored. Instead, exploiting the real life pregnancy of actress Emily Deschanel the show took the story from a Burley-rejected Booth, drunk and brooding in a bar, to a Booth grinning happily at a pregnant Brennan, leaving so many blanks in the action in between that ratings began to slide and the threats made at the end of season 6 to boycott any Hanson-Nathan show in the future began to be realized.

Stephen Nathan, asked if he had concerns that people who had invested six seasons in the B&B relationship would be upset at missing so much, replied: “No. No concern at all. We didn’t care…if people want more than that, honestly, you need to go find a [porn web site]” (Paskin, 2011). This continued hostility toward viewers, particularly those on social media, alienated fans who had continued to watch. Posted “Ellie”: “I feel annoyed…after reading these belittling comments”; “Drea” added “I’m just offended by that statement in general”, and “Mandy” replied: “For SN to imply we want porn because he and HH failed to deliver…[is] insulting”. According to Shelly: “I’m feeling like HH and Co., just flipped me the bird” (Roffman, 2011b). “Bella” summed up the majority social media response on February 11, 2011: “I realized I am so over the show…I’ll be careful to never watch anything Hanson or Nathan are writing in the future” (Curtis, 2011d). This was not an idle threat by a random poster but by someone who as it turned out represented nearly half the Bones audience.

All through season 6, Hart Hanson had repeatedly reiterated his belief that those using social media were different from a normal audience, that those who spoke loudest online were separate and apart from the show’s average viewers. Hanson’s commitment to this conviction undercut any impetus on the part of the showrunners to placate irate social media fans, yet the very plethora of interviews they gave suggests an underlying but robustly denied unease. For all of Hanson’s dismissal of fans on social media as outliers distinct from a general audience, more than one social media user had made the telling point that these superfans were in fact the visible tip of a very large iceberg not something separate from it. Their views reflected to a noticeable degree the opinions of others who made up the hidden mass of silent ice just below the surface, a mass composed of viewers who did not participate online but who more or less mirrored the same attitudes and expectations. That offline audience might be slower at registering a consensus immediately reflected in the ratings but that consensus when it finally appeared was unlikely to differ wildly from those who posted comments on social media. One of the lessons that the Bones paradigm of seasons 6 and 7 demonstrated was that social media was and is the canary in the coal mine, a barometer of anticipated audience reaction, and while that reaction may lag behind the noisy online opinions of superfans, the consensus it reaches is in the end generally the same.

Together with a faltering season 7, slipping DVD sales (Jen, 2011; Kim, 2010; Kirsty5150, 2014) and soon to dip advertising rates (Aurthur, 2013), another victim of the Bones season 6 fallout and proof of a consensus of general audience opinion was the fate of the quirky new procedural that Hanson tried to launch in early 2012 called The Finder. He had promoted it as a spin-off of Bones, when in fact it was a “back-door” pilot, a new show whose continuing characters had nothing to do with the Bones universe. Inserting its pilot episode as episode 19 of the Bones season 6 line-up (broadcast April 21, 2011), it was immediately attacked by social media posters still fuming over the Burley arc. “skylark66” posted: “I feel kinda cheated … it felt like they used and abused the Bones cast to promote this [episode]”, and “AnnG” added: [In The Finder] the end BB scenes feel like pandering, which I suppose was always the case, but now everyone can tell how artificial it is” (Curtis, 2011c). As t.v. critic for the Los Angeles Times, Mary McNamara, remarked about the full launch of The Finder season: “The problem with ‘back-door pilots’ … is that they are invariably better than the front-door versions that follow” (McNamara, 2012). This pilot episode highlighted The Finder’s leading male character Walter (played by Geoff Stults) as someone with a romantic interest in Brennan, and with Hanson promoting future Bones/Finder crossover episodes the suggestion soon went around the web that in order to promote The Finder, the writers were planning to involve Brennan in her own SO story arc. For those still watching the show the idea was not well received.

Both Fox and Hanson had hoped that by scheduling Bones as the lead-in for the new show, the Bones audience could be lured into staying tuned. But The Finder’s lack of social media support reflected both lack of interest on the part of those still watching Bones and residual anger on the part of those who had moved on, all agitated by the showrunners’ continuing vocal hostility in interviews posted online toward the disaffected, dubbed by Hanson on Twitter as “the Dim Nasties” (Hanson, 2010c). One angry poster remarked: “I’m going to boycott the Finder…and I’m going to get as many Bones fans as possible not to watch the Finder…so that ratings will fail miserably in Fox and Hart’s faces” (jro54, 2011). “TV by the Numbers”, a website that tracks ratings, commented on January 13, 2012: “Fox launched The Finder with an episode of Bones and that didn’t go too well. Bones, on its own at 8 pm, could muster only a 2.4 adults 18–49 rating and the premiere of The Finder at 9 pm could only find a 1.7 adults 18–49 rating. Normally that would lead to some very quick prognostications of doom” (Seidman, 2012).

In an effort to boost ratings, The Finder was given the same post-American Idol timeslot that Bones had been given the previous year. Bones characters played by T.J. Thyne and John Francis Daley made Finder guest appearances. David Boreanaz was tapped to direct an episode. But those on social media who had deserted the Bones ship boycotted the new show and those still watching Bones regarded The Finder as competition and tuned out. “Olivia” was typical of social media commentators when she posted on April 22nd: “I feel like I have been tricked [into watching]…cause this had almost noting (sic) to do with Bones. Haven’t enjoyed [it] even a little bit” (Curtis, 2011c). The Finder premiered after Bones on January 12, 2012, and was switched to the post-American Idol slot the following week, but it performed so poorly that by March 2nd it had been exiled to a Friday night timeslot, a night frequently dubbed a graveyard for under-performing shows (Lynch, 2014). Its season’s ratings averaged 1.6/5.77, and the final six episodes barely broke four million viewers. By April 17th it was “sure to be cancelled” (Gorman, 2012) On May 9th it was.

The Finder was the first in a series of shows that, trying to capitalize on the perceived success of the season 6 ratings, Fox now attempted to launch from a Bones platform. That such campaigns failed in every instance did not alter the network’s approach. Working primarily through postings on Twitter and Facebook that were quickly picked up and posted to a variety of dedicated blogs, Fox publicity concentrated on using social media to lure the fandom into watching a successive stream of new shows that were all framed as companion pieces to Bones. Such tactics demonstrated a corporate commitment to the growing commercialization of social media and an explicit expression of its belief in social media’s power and importance as a networking tool able to mobilize fan communities as potential audiences through enthusiastic word of mouth. This operating belief stood in direct opposition to Hanson’s earlier claims that social media while noisy was unrepresentative of the show’s broader audience, irrelevant to its creative choices, and inconsequential to its business model. Although Fox had previously spent time and money on extended Bones promotional spots for seasons 5 and 6, broadcast on the network during primetime, after season 6 these ceased (sophia7gr, 2009, 2010). Now promos were directed solely at fans on social media through Fox’s Bones Facebook page, the #BONESonFOX Twitter hashtag and through interviews with online bloggers reposted on their platforms, a striking – and cheaper – change in approach.

The headline of The Hollywood Reporter on October 18, 2013, read “Fox Banking on ‘Bones’ to Boost ‘Almost Human’ Launch” (Ng, 2013). After the demise of The Finder, Fox promoted its new futuristic buddy cop show through an online advertising campaign that compared the robot policeman in Almost Human to the character of Dr. Temperance Brennan in Bones, immediately resurrecting the still simmering hostility on social media that had responded so negatively to the portrayal of Brennan in season 6 as a clueless robot. Facebook was flooded with comments like: “Comparing Brennan to a robot is not the way to make Bones fans watch … stupid advertising” (aredlos aluap airam, 2013), and “Sorry FOX ... won’t work ... I’ll be elsewhere on Monday at 8:00 ... Shame on you for treating Bones and Bones fans in this way” (eebgib aseret, 2013). Inevitably, given the overwhelming resentment to such advertising, a majority of Bones fans boycotted the show, which parenthetically was an expensive one to produce. Like The Finder, Almost Human ran 13 episodes, from November 17, 2013 through March 3, 2014, and was cancelled April 29, 2014 (Bibel, 2014), with a 1.7/6.66 season’s average rating (Andreeva, 2014).

On January 22, 2015, the network and Hart Hanson decided to try once again to woo Bones fans into supporting a new Hanson show, Backstrom. It was the third procedural crime drama in a row that Hanson had developed for Fox and studio publicity together with the showrunner and his cast took to social media to promote it among Bones watchers. But in a repetition of efforts to promote the two earlier shows, as far as the Bones fans were concerned the publicity for this new show was equally ill-conceived. Temperance Brennan was now compared to Backstrom’s eponymous detective in much the same way she had been compared to the android in Almost Human. Characterized by Robert Bianco at USA Today, Backstrom was a “conceited, misanthropic, homophobic, racist, rude, overweight, alcoholic slob” (Bianco, 2015). Unsurprisingly Bones fans were not happy with the comparison. When Bones was put on a four-month hiatus to make room on the Fox schedule for Backstrom and a February 11, 2015, T.V. Guide article hit the internet, entitled, “It’s Backstrom vs. Bones!”, there was an immediate and predictable response. Not only was the comparison of Brennan to Backstrom onerous but just as with The Finder and Almost Human, Backstrom, having been presented as both a competitor and possible usurper of Bones’ timeslot, became, with inevitable results, an adversarial series not a companion piece. “#Bones all the way!”, posted “viggie4”, and “kmw” remarked, “Sorry Backstrom is a grimy crude version of Brennan … I will stick with Bones” (Bryant, 2015).

Once again the divisiveness and animosity created on social media by Bones season 6 emerged to plague the prospects of the new show. When Fox initially announced that it was greenlighting the development of Backstrom, “eridapo” posted: “If Hart Hanson has anything to do with something, No way I’m watching it…Yes. Full fledged member of the Dim Nasty brigade.” To which “Amy” responded: “not a fan of HH so I’m with you on this” (Mitovich, 2013). Even though he had no connection to Backstrom, Bones’ associate showrunner and purveyor-in-chief of Bones fan torture, Stephen Nathan, was included in this broad-sweeping backlash. Twitter hashtags #boycottbackstrom and #boycottstephennathan were created. Backstrom’s 13 episodes averaged 1.0/3.98 well below ratings for both The Finder and Almost Human, and on May 8, 2015 it, too, was cancelled. Shortly thereafter, Nathan left serial television and Hanson, who had stepped down as Bones showrunner in 2014, left Fox (Abrams, 2014; Abrams & Hibbard, 2015).

The quality of all three of these short-lived series may be debated and certainly there was a variety of factors including production costs that led to their poor showing and subsequent cancellation. But what is identifiable in each case is the weaponization of social media as a coordinating force that took advantage of its immediate online access to attack, damage and destroy a specific target or targets. Due to the continuing animosity toward the showrunners nursed by disaffected Bones fans after the internet wars of 2010–2011, a determination to sabotage any new show produced by Hanson or Nathan continued for several years up until Hanson’s final departure from Fox. This determination was compounded by the hostility of those still watching Bones toward any show set up by Fox, inadvertently or not, in competition to their own. Like those on social media still nursing their grievances over season 6 five years later, Bones showrunners continued to agitate online by making inflammatory statements. When asked by GMMR on March 6, 2015, which of the earlier episodes of the entire series Bones fans might enjoy re-watching while the show was on hiatus to make room for Backstrom, Hanson suggested: “I would say watch one of the ones that drove the fans insane, that kept [Booth and Brennan] apart … Watch [one of those] again and you will enjoy it’” (Roffman, 2015). The response to that on social media was a deafening silence.

9. Conclusion

During season 6 of Bones showrunners Hart Hanson and Stephen Nathan consciously pioneered new narrative directions for scripted television drama storytelling by laying to rest the so-called Moonlighting curse. They were also early exponents of the use of social media as a communications, advertising and networking platform. But the season simultaneously revealed substantial weaknesses not only in the traditionally accepted pacing of linear story arcs but in a misunderstanding of the significance, range, and power of social media. Some showrunners like Joss Whedon (Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Angel, Firefly) have found social media’s direct access to fans exciting.

To be able to write and to have people be able to speak to you about it is more than a writer usually gets (James, 2014).

But showrunning “is a bit like putting a Rubik’s Cube together in under a minute” and as Hart Hanson was to later remark, “When it fails, it’s really blatant. There are not many places to hide (James, 2011).”

Before the birth of Facebook and Twitter disaffected fans might have written individual snail mail letters to the networks; showrunners were generally anonymous. But social media in its varied manifestations, whose launch was roughly coterminous with the debut of Bones, itself, offered commercialization possibilities, unparalleled access and real time responses. Comments and critiques could now be posted during the actual broadcast of an episode. As Frank Rose has commented:

[The Internet] is nonlinear … It is inherently participatory – not just interactive, in the sense that it responds to your commands, but an instigator constantly encouraging you to comment, to contribute, to join in. And it is immersive – meaning that you can use it to drill down as deeply as you like about anything you care to (Rose, 2011, pp. 2–3).

Such participatory immediacy and encouragement to join in magnifies the power of a show to reach its audience but it also magnifies the power of an online community’s ability to organize in ways that impact that show for good or ill.

New online sources of information like Showfax can provide spoilers and help identify story trends before an episode is even shot allowing feedback to fan networks that precedes its broadcast. These real time reactions give showrunners little breathing room for a measured response and in the case of Bones season 6 elicited over-hasty reactions that were in many instances destructive to the show and to its long-term relationship with its fans. By the time the season 6 story arc had been hinted at in May 2010, the potential for social media to influence network decisions had already been demonstrated a year earlier in April 2009 when fans of the NBC comedy-drama, Chuck, collectivized as a social media ‘union’ and launched a ‘Save Chuck’ campaign that ultimately convinced the network to renew the show (Rose, 2011, pp. 193–98). If social media could be used politically to advance a Green Revolution in Iran in 2009 or underpin 2011’s Arab Spring, its impact on a television show should have been predictable (Jenkins, 2006; Keller, 2010).

From a season 6 ratings high of 3.9/12.05 on January 27, 2011 (Seidman, 2011c), Bones ratings fell to 1.9/7.21 by the May 14, 2012, season 7 finale (Bibel, 2012), losing 40% of its viewer base. Hart Hanson was once asked why one of the pivotal episodes of season 6, “The Doctor in the Photo”, had the lowest ratings for the season and he answered that the fault lay with the episode that preceded it (Roffman, 2011a). What was true for episodes was also true for seasons. Season 7 had its own strengths and weaknesses but the ratings plummeted because season 6 had poisoned the well of fan satisfaction and had shattered for a majority of posters on social media both show loyalty and showrunner trust. As some on social media had warned from the beginning, a show’s general audience was not a separate entity from the noisemakers online.

As early as 2006 Jenkins proposed the emerging online convergence culture as a meaningful interaction of unhampered flow of content across multiple media platforms, those who control the platforms, and “the migratory behavior of media audiences who will go almost anywhere in search of the kinds of entertainment experiences they want” (Jenkins, 2006). This exploding world of “multi-medianess” puts extreme pressure on older, linear storytelling formats. With shrinking audiences for network television and proliferating platforms for alternative viewing experiences individual network programs are having to work ever harder to hold onto the viewers they have. The big 4 networks (CBS, ABC, NBC, Fox) are increasingly incentivized to pay close attention to the chatter on social media. Live tweeting by writers and producers during broadcasts, websites where writers’ room feeds are regularly reviewed and rated, Nielsen ratings measuring social media postings, Tumblr, pod casts, and YouTube have all changed the internet landscape since 2010. During season 8 (2012–2013) Fox even initiated a social media “Bones Fan of the Week” award. Just like any other competitive arena, aggressive negative campaigning on social media, David Herrin’s “bad conversation”, can have long-lasting, detrimental effects on any targeted show and correspondingly on its showrunners. Season 6 demonstrated that while social media posters may appropriate Twitter, Facebook, chat rooms, and blog feeds to attack a given storyline the consequences for the show can be even more damaging when ancillary actions are taken by showrunners to strike back through interviews, personal appearances, and online postings. Showrunners – and studios – have a product to protect; anonymous posters have nothing to lose.

Satisfying this study’s original objectives it may be noted that the confusion and contradictions in storytelling that marked season 6, the deviation from the originally proposed narrative and sudden expansion of the SO arc, the flood of explanatory interviews and their rebarbative responses suggest that the impact of self-assembled superfan aggregates on social media did indeed have a substantial effect not only on a particular season of one television show but on subsequent Fox programming as well. Mark Goffman, former executive producer of Sleepy Hollow on Fox, said in a 2014 interview regarding pressures from social media: “I don’t know that necessarily we are changing story lines or even putting in dialogue, but we try to find little Easter eggs that [fans] are going to pick up on, to reward people paying close attention” (Grant, 2014). The greater the influence that social media has on the viewing habits not only of discrete online communities but through a ripple effect on audiences in general the greater will be the divide between those who want to tell their own story and those who want to control the story they hear. The impact of such change was both predicted and exemplified by the interactions and outcomes of the sixth season of Bones.

Funding

The author received no direct funding for this research.

Cover image

Emily Deschanel, Katheryn Winnick and David Boreanaz. “Bones” (Fox). Source: http://www.foxflash.com/content/terms-use

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Susan E. James

Susan E. James is an independent writer and researcher who earned her PhD at Cambridge University. She has written extensively in the fields of the humanities and social sciences, publishing over 30 peer-reviewed articles on various aspects of the social sciences and three books on sixteenth-century English history: Kateryn Parr: The Making of a Queen (1999), The Feminine Dynamic in English Art, 1485–1603: Women as Consumers, Patrons and Painters (2009, nominated for the Berger Prize), and Women’s Voices in Tudor Wills, 1485–1603: Authority, Influence and Material Culture (2015). She has also published extensively in outlets like the Los Angeles Times on various aspects of the entertainment industry and has been a television and film critic for the La Canada Valley Sun and for Crescenta Valley Weekly.