FOX Originally Wanted 'Bones' to Be More Like 'The X-Files'

When the long-running procedural drama Bones first debuted on FOX, the network was hoping for something a little more like The X-Files, star David Boreanaz revealed during a recent convention panel.

Boreanaz appeared at New York Comic Con last month, and as part of a wide-ranging talk about his career, shared some recollections about the early days of Bones. Boreanaz followed up Buffy and Angel with a 12-year stint on the hit, in which he appeared opposite Emily Deschanel. He told fans that the network didn't really see what it would ultimately become in the beginning.

"The network saw it as an X-Files type show, they were just coming off of X-Files," Boreanaz said. "For us, it was relationship relationship relationship. As seasons went on we created it and they were all for it."

The show would later have a little fun with the X-Files connection in the 2010 episode "The X in the File," in which Bones would lovingly lampoon The X-Files. In the episode, FBI Agent Seeley Booth (Boreanaz) and scientist Temperance Brennan (Deschanel) traveled to New Mexico to investigate when a body is found in the desert near Roswell.

This episode featured several allusions to The X-Files, which centered on mysterious and unexplainable cases FBI agents Fox Mulder and Dana Scully would investigate, most notably with an overarching storyline about governmental cover-ups of alien activity on earth.

Dean Haglund, who played Richard Langley (one of the Lone Gunmen) on The X-Files, appeared in the Bones episode as the owner of a UFO-themed diner. A few bars of the X-Files theme tune acutally played at various points in the episode, too.

At the time of the episode, The X-Files as a franchise was largely dormant, still recovering from an underwhelming outing at the box office with the 2008 movie The X-Files: I Want to Believe.

In 2013, IDW Publishing would release The X-Files: Season Ten from writer Joe Harris, who would go on to write X-Files comics for several more years. An actual tenth season for the series would air in 2016, contradicting much of what Harris had created, but the cast of the series still came together to dramatize some of Harris's stories for Audible-exclusive audiobooks.