The Only Bones Episode Written By Sweets Actor John Francis Daley

From 2007 to 2014 and across 138 episodes, writer, director, producer, and actor John Francis Daley played Dr. Lance Sweets on "Bones," Hart Hanson's beloved procedural series about forensic anthropologists solving cold cases. Did you know, though, that Daley also wrote one of those episodes?

The season 6 episode "The Truth in the Myth" — which was written by Daley and Jonathan M. Goldstein, directed by Chad Lowe, and came out in 2011 — focuses on a case involving a man who worked as a "mythbuster" named Lee Coleman (Leigh McCloskey) who, it's believed, died in some sort of incident with the mythical Chupacabra. (There's also some kerfuffle over one of Lee's rivals, a guy named Terry Bemis played by R.F. Daley, who's mad that his own mythbusting show got canceled.) After Temperance "Bones" Brennan (Emily Deschanel) and her team keep investigating, they find all sorts of different animal traces on the corpse, including bite marks, scales from reptiles, and hair from mammals, though the pragmatic Bones remains convinced that it's all some sort of hoax.

Bones is, as usual, right. The weird noise on the video that was taken during Lee's last moments turns out to not be the growl of some sort of creature, but the hum of an ATV — and it turns out that a coordinator at a nearby lodge named Melissa (Laura Eichhorn) was driving one and shot Lee by mistake because he wasn't wearing an orange safety vest. Melissa and the lodge's staff covered it all up, hoping to make it look like Lee was attacked by a strange animal, and the case is closed.

The episode is pretty fun, which is to say that it's not surprising that Daley and Goldstein penned this installment. Why? After Daley got his start in Hollywood at a young age, he and Goldstein became creative partners, and they've produced some seriously phenomenal scripts.

A lot of careers started on NBC's one-season wonder "Freaks and Geeks," which is particularly remarkable when, again, you consider that it only ran for 18 episodes. Paul Feig created the series, Judd Apatow worked on it, and it starred everyone from Linda Cardellini to Busy Phillips to Seth Rogen to Jason Segel ... and, as it happens, John Francis Daley, who plays Sam Weir, younger brother to Cardellini's Lindsey and one of the titular "geeks." (He's joined by Martin Starr's Bill Haverchuck and Samm Levine's Neal Schweiber, and those guys are still working pretty steadily too.)

Obviously, Daley's winning, earnest turn as Sam helped launch his career in Hollywood, and anyone who's not familiar with this coming-of-age comedy likely knows Daley from his turn as Dr. Lance Sweets. Daley made his debut as the character in the procedural's third season, introducing the good doctor as a psychologist working with the FBI, meaning that he comes to the Jeffersonian Institute thanks to his FBI colleague, Special Agent Seeley Booth (David Boreanaz). Something that's notable about Sweets is that he looks really, really young — which means there's a lot of fuss made about the fact that he's incredibly babyfaced for such an accomplished guy — but he's incredibly good at his job and trained in classic psychoanalysis, often turning to Freudian theories and older schools of thought. (This tends to annoy Booth, but Sweets is typically correct.) Sweets eventually becomes the first main character on "Bones" to die when, in the show's 10th season, he's stabbed to death by an operative working for a shadow government. Despite their best efforts, Booth and Bones can't save him, and the absence of both Sweets and Daley is definitely felt throughout the rest of the show, which ultimately concluded after season 12.

John Francis Daley's time as Dr. Lance Sweets ended in 2014, but even before that, Daley started working with Jonathan M. Goldstein — in fact, Goldstein has spent his entire Hollywood career working with Daley, so clearly the two are a match made in heaven. Their first big success came in 2011 with "Horrible Bosses," which the two co-wrote; in 2013, they followed that up with "The Incredible Burt Wonderstone" and "Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs 2." The sequel to their first feature film, "Horrible Bosses 2," arrived in 2014, and in 2017, they wrote "Spider-Man: Homecoming," which became a box office juggernaut and cemented the two as a successful screenwriting duo.

Goldstein and Daley also wrote one of the best studio comedies in recent memory, "Game Night," which was released in 2018, and in 2023, they were the pair behind the phenomenal script for the absolutely underrated fantasy epic "Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves." There is, quite frankly, no doubt that these two guys are really good writers; if there's one thing all of these projects have in common, it's that they're funny and charming without being cloying or irritating, so "Bones" fans should revisit "The Truth in the Myth" to experience one of the earliest collaborations between Daley and Goldstein.

"Bones" is streaming on Hulu now.