Bones Tried And Failed To Follow A Bottle Episode Budget

As "Bones" headed into its first-ever midseason break at the end of 2005, the show's creatives were starting to breathe just a little easier. The series was consistently drawing seven million viewers a week and even creator Hart Hanson was beginning to realize his modest procedural dramedy might yet enjoy a healthy shelf life on par with the likes of "Magnum, P.I." and its own forbearer on FOX, "The X-Files," after "Bones" found its groove with its fourth episode, "The Man in the Bear." But with penny-pinching network execs still breathing down his neck, the pressure was on Hanson to employ some cost-cutting measures.

Enter season 1, episode 9, "The Man in the Fallout Shelter" (December 13, 2005). This particular Christmas-themed outing sees Dr. Temperance "Bones" Brennan (Emily Deschanel) and her crew investigating a skeleton that, true to the title of the episode, has been rotting away in an atomic fallout shelter for decades. When they slice the dead man's bones open, however, they unwittingly release a strain of Coccidioidomycosis, a soil fungus native to California's San Joaquin Valley that can cause a dangerous disease known as Valley Fever (hence the name).

Far from a venture into Yuletide horror, this could-be disturbing turn of events instead forces Bones and the rest of her squad to be quarantined in their lab at the Jeffersonian Institute, giving rise to a mixture of shenanigans and heartwarming moments (as you'd expect from one of the show's lighter hours). Moreover, "The Man in the Fallout Shelter" operates as a bottle episode in the classic sense, i.e. it takes place in a single location, only features the main cast, and employs a pre-built set. Ironically, according to Hanson, it also wound up being one of the show's costliest hours, much to his consternation at the time.

Speaking to Paul Ruditis for his book "Bones: The Official Companion," Hanson explained that "The Man in the Fallout Shelter" was intended to kill two birds with one stone. "The network said they wanted a Christmas-themed episode," he recalled. "And we really, really, needed a bottle show." Hanson and Co. eventually settled on a quarantine episode, which would itself become a hallmark of soapy medical dramas in the years that followed. (Although Bill Lawrence's funny-sad "Scrubs" beat all of them to the punch with "My Quarantine," which had already aired earlier in 2005.)

Unfortunately, while "The Man in the Fallout Shelter" made for good television in Hanson's eye, it kind of defeated the whole purpose of doing a bottle episode to begin with. As he put it:

"We promised that we'd do a bottle show to get closer to what the budget number for the season was supposed to be. We wrote a bottle show, but it was filmically so interesting that, by the time we added up the cost, it was as expensive as anything else we ever did."

Luckily for him, all that spending didn't go unappreciated. When season 1 resumed on January 25, 2006, "Bones" attracted 11 million viewers for the first time in its run before airing its all-time most-viewed episode, "The Woman in the Car," a mere week later. Its numbers stayed incredibly steady from that point until the back-half of season 7, and even after that its decline was gradual and probably had as much to do with the rise of streaming as audience fatigue. So, although its bottle episode didn't go as planned, the show defied the odds and became a proper hit anyway. But isn't that just the story of "Bones" in a nutshell?