Lucifer Went To Battle To Get Those Bones Nods In The Show

There's nothing quite like a TV show that features our protagonists watching another, somewhat random TV show. In "The Sopranos," Tony at one point unwinds with an episode of "Gilmore Girls." In "Community," pop culture superfan Abed gets really, really into the ABC sitcom "Cougar Town." And in "Family Guy," the Griffin family watches, well, everything.

"Lucifer," the cult favorite supernatural series that aired from 2016 to 2021, took the TV-show-in-a-TV-show trope one step further by using a different primetime series as the catalyst for one of its best callbacks. In a season 3 plot, Luci (Tom Ellis) refuses to sleep after learning that he may be moonlighting as a guardian angel in a fantastical take on sleepwalking. He stays up for a week straight, binge-watching 12 seasons of the always-gross, always-shippable hit forensics drama "Bones" all the while, and even resurfaces with a new nickname for Chloe (Lauren German).

The "Bones" references aren't just a one-off; three seasons later, after the show had been canceled by FOX (also the network behind "Bones") and landed on Netflix, "Bones" came up again in a big way. In the show's penultimate episode, Lucifer's daughter from the future, Rory (Brianna Hildebrand), shares a bonding moment with her dad over "Bones" and its reboot. What reboot, you ask? Well, one that "Lucifer" made up that, in a stroke of inspiration, is called "More Bones." According to Rory (and the script pages shared by TVLine at the time), "More Bones" stars the cyborg daughter of Booth (David Boreanaz) and Brennan (Emily Deschanel), Borgie. Of course, the lead characters in "Bones" already have kids by the end of the series, but Borgie is presumably a third child – unless their daughter Christine somehow turns into a bionic woman later in life.

At any rate, Rory tells Lucifer that "More Bones" rocks, and that the sexual tension between Borgie and her boneless android partner Agent Andro is "off the charts." Hilariously, "Lucifer" co-showrunner Joe Henderson told TVLine that the initial "Bones" reference, accompanied by clips from early seasons of the show that pique Luci's interest, were something he had to fight for. "Part of what drove [the references] is we fought so hard to get those 'Bones' clips," he told the outlet in 2021. "It was the weirdest fight I've ever picked, where I was calling people up like, 'I need 'Bones,' I need 'Bones!'" Getting the rights to footage from another TV show can be tricky, even when the two shows share a network.

"They were like, 'Why?,' and I explained that 'It's an arbitrary joke but it's amazing!'" Henderson recalled. In that same season 3 episode in which Lucifer initially binge-watches "Bones," he's able to confirm that a mysterious man is, in fact, an actor since he recognized him ... from an episode of "Bones." The FOX series' creator, Hart Hanson, was clued into the fun the first time around, and reportedly gave his blessing for the "Bones" references, even if they were in jest. "Hart was always like, 'Don't worry about it — and if you want to poke fun, I have tough skin,'" Henderson told TVLine. "But I was like, 'No, we are not poking fun, this is love letter material, full stop."

Rory ends up in peril soon after her heart-to-heart "Bones" chat with Lucifer, but thankfully, the character survives the show's series finale and is returned safely to her own timeline. Unfortunately, the fact that the callback came so late in the series means that fans never heard more about the can't-miss TV experience that is "More Bones," but Henderson was still satisfied with the bonding moment. "We fought so hard for [the footage] that when we finally got it, it felt like we earned it," he explained. When it came time to write season 6, "We were looking for callbacks, and the idea that Lucifer found this passion in his life, and his daughter carries it on, is weirdly beautiful." Ironically, the "Bones" series finale included a show-within-a-show callback too — to yet another iconic investigative duo.

All six seasons of "Lucifer" are now on Netflix, while you can catch "Bones" in its entirety on Hulu and Freevee. "More Bones," sadly, is not currently available to stream.