Bonekickers: Archaeology meets CSI
Sunday July 13, 2008
Now, I live in the United States and so haven't seen it, but I'm reliably told that there is a brand new television series on BBC One that has fictional archaeologists solving modern and ancient mysteries. Bonekickers looks to be a serious/comic drama, with the trailer suggesting an IJ-like vibe. The series is getting mixed reviews among the blogging crowd, to say the least (e.g., snark with a capital SNARK).
Here are some reviews around and about:
- Bonekickers official website on BBC
- Bonekickers is hilarious, you dig? Maev Kennedy on the Art and Architecture Blog
- Dead & Buried, from i blog, you blog, they blog
- Bonekickers Just Left Me Cross, John West in the Coventry Telegraph.
- +ve on Bonekickers, Alun Salt on Archaeoastronomy
- Bonekickers 1x1, Rob on The Word is Not Enough
- Bonekickers: I Can’t Do the Math, Mikeachim on Fevered Mutterings
- What the Papers Say: Bonekickers, on Writing for Performance, includes a roundup of newspaper reviews
- BBC tries combining Indiana Jones, CSI, and religion…and fails, Atheist Blogger
- Bonekickers Digs Up 6.8 Million Viewers, Ian McCullen in SciFi Pulse
Sadly, although the BBC website has videos of the past programs and teasers for the next, anyone outside of the UK is blocked from viewing them. As a huge fan of pop culture archaeology, I'm hoping the bad reviews don't take it out of circulation before us colonials get a look at it.
Comments
I stand by what I wrote in my (yes, snarky) review.
(Thanks for the link, by the way).
It’s a travesty. I’m an ex-archaelogy student so I know a lot of people in the field whose reactions ranged from bemused to incensed.
I just think it’s a horrible shame.
Well, as I say, I haven’t seen it, but the reviews are really bad, as you can tell from the linked selections. Even the good ones have caveats galore! Clearly, snark is sometimes an appropriate application.
Thanks for your note!
Kris
One of the Museum of London osteologists also wrote in response on our blog. Mike’s post is at Bonekickers: when reality and fiction collide.
I also look forward to brandishing my museum ID card in an authoritative FBI-style fashion!
Be very grateful that the BBC protected you from this utter rubbish – they’ve been kinder to the US than to their home audience!
Main issue is that this was supposed to be a flagship drama, when what we actually got was shouty, exposition laden, inaccurate in just about every way possible, PC farce.
I was hoping for something like CSI or Waking the Dead. I forgot, though, how painful it is to watch such dramatizations when you have first hand experience of the reality. I remember I was big fan of Quincy, which was a program about a fictional TV medical examiner in the 1970s (supposed to be based on a real guy), but when they ran a specific program about something I knew about, it was awful, just a hideous over-simplification of what I knew to be a complex illness. Put me off the whole thing.
I know I’ve heard from MEs and other anthro types that such programs give a false impression of what the profession is like. It may be that it is the idea of what we do that makes good TV, and not so much the reality.
Bonekickers episode 3 gets as bad a reviews as the others (or perhaps a tad worse):
http://www.denofgeek.com/television/89622/bonekickers_episode_3_review.html
Here’s another review of Episode 3:
http://www.tvscoop.tv/2008/07/tv_review_bonek_2.html