Bones Created Its Own Golf Course For The Man On The Fairway

Spending in television is a game of chance. Some weeks, you can keep things on the cheap and get away with doing a glorified bottle episode. Other times, you have to construct your own golf course because the locals don't take kindly to you wanting to fake a plane crash on their freshly-mowed grass, complete with (also fake but still nasty) dismembered body parts.

"Bones" season 1, episode 14, "The Man on the Fairway," finds everyone's favorite sensible forensics expert, the good Dr. Temperance "Bones" Brennan (Emily Deschanel), and her motley crew investigating said plane crash at a golf course not too far from Virginia Beach. In a firmly on-brand coincidence, Bones and the gang happen upon the remains of a non-passenger while inspecting the crash site. The episode takes the usual twists and turns from there, even delving into "Fargo" territory when Bones and all deduce that the victim was likely hacked into pieces before being fed into a wood chipper. Meanwhile, her assistant Zack Addy (Eric Millegan) — still a ways off from being seduced into carrying out the Gormogon's bidding — worries about his bromance with Special Agent Seeley Booth (David Boreanaz). Perhaps they could spend some alone time man-bonding over a game of golf?

No dice. In an interview for Paul Ruditis' book "Bones: The Official Companion," co-executive producer Steve Beers revealed that the episode's golf course was inoperable and purely for looks, having been built on a park near the water gap in Whittier, California (which stood in for the Maryland coastline). As Beers explained, the show's creatives had tried to get a real golf-course to let them film there, but failed to convince anyone that lending their services to a hit network series was worth the cost of shuttering business for a few days.

Time is money in the golf world, but apparently a prime FOX series in the '00s didn't pay as well as all those customers hoping to land a tee time. "The golf courses around here don't want to stop play," Beers recounted, noting that it would've taken "several days" just to get all the set dressing in place for the shoot, including "laying the plane in and scarring the ground and then going back and repairing everything once we were done."

In due time, he and his fellow producers realized they were better off just assembling their own makeshift golf course instead. "So we'll go to where they'll let us do it," Beers added. "We'll cut some grass, put a flag in, and there's your golf course. That way you're able to open your lens up and not get hit by golf balls!"

While the episode may have been lacking for zany golf escapades, "The Man on the Fairway" made up for that by having Zack and his lab buddy Jack Hodgins (T.J. Thyne) chuck a frozen pig into a wood chipper to "test" their theory about the mystery victim. This would itself give rise to the long running gag involving Hodgins', ahem, unconventional methods of data collection on "Bones." Let those hoity-toity upper-class types keep their pristine golf course, I say; everyone knows that if you wanna have some real fun, set a bunch of eccentric science-types loose in a laboratory.

"Bones" is currently streaming on Amazon Prime Video and Hulu.