Skeletons keep coming out of closet in ‘Bones’

As Season 1 of the Fox drama “Bones” concluded last spring, forensic anthropologist Dr. Temperance “Bones” Brennan (Emily Deschanel) discovered that her long-missing parents were not who she believed they were; that her name was actually Joy Keenan; that her brother, Russ (Loren Dean), had long kept painful secrets; that her mother was, in fact, dead; and that her father was, in fact, not.

As if all this weren’t tangled enough, Season 2, which premieres at 8 p.m. Wednesday, throws a wheelbarrow full of additional wrenches into Brennan’s already complicated private life, her professional life at the Jeffersonian Institute (the show’s fictional version of the Smithsonian) and her not-quite- romantic relationship with her partner in crime solving, FBI agent Seeley Booth (David Boreanaz).

To start with, Brennan and her “squints” (Booth’s nickname for scientists) get a new boss, federal coroner Dr. Camille Saroyan (Tamara Taylor), who matches Brennan’s scientific skill with a more focused attention on crime.

“Cam is a coroner,” series creator Hart Hanson says. “She’s been the coroner of New York. She makes cases. She has a cop’s mentality. Temperance Brennan and her squints are all about finding the truth, and those are slightly different things.

“Cam would never fake anything to get anyone -- it’s nothing like that. But she’s focused on getting the bad guy, so she’s very efficient in her investigations.

“Brennan tends to go all over the place looking at all the clues and then deciding what they mean. So it gives them lots of good conflict.”

Also, it turns out that Cam and Booth have met before. “They have, in fact, slept together before,” Hanson says. “They have a history, so that gives us a great triangle.”

As Booth juggles these two women, a third is thrown into the mix -- the mother of Booth’s child, played by Jessica Capshaw.

“Is it the beginning of a downfall for Booth?” Boreanaz asks. “Maybe.”

On its surface, “Bones” is an episodic drama about solving crimes, but Hanson says it’s more of a balancing act between procedural and character elements.

“If you don’t like the humor or the two leads in ‘Bones,’ ” Hanson says, “you don’t like the show. Some shows are just safer. Our show is more of a gamble. It’s a more specific taste than something like ‘24,’ certainly [more] than the procedural shows, where you know exactly what you’re getting.

“We can’t go full soap, and we certainly don’t go full procedural. Every episode, we walk that line. I think we’ve gotten better at it.”