The BONES Team Reunites to Support the Ongoing WGA Strike

The BONES team reunited on Friday, July 7, outside of the Fox lot where they filmed the drama for 12 seasons for a very important cause: supporting the WGA during their ongoing strike against the studios.

The writers went on strike when their contract expired on May 1, as they sought to guarantee things like the size of a writers’ room size and an increase in residuals, as well as a decrease in unpaid labor and limits on how AI is utilized. (For a full list of their requests and the studios’ reply, see here.)

“It’s a way to salvage the careers of writers,” former BONES showrunner Stephen Nathan tells Give Me My Remote in the video below. “Everything is moving in a direction which is unknown at this point—but we can certainly see a few things on the horizon. And they don’t bode well for the writers; unless we get our foot in the door, we could be locked out [of] any meaningful career in the business. So that seems like a pretty good reason to go on strike.”

“And, also, we are [not] dealing with studios that are run independently anymore,” he continues. “They’re giant corporations.”

“And they don’t care about entertainment,” BONES creator Hart Hanson adds. “They don’t care about show business. They’re vulture capitalists.”

“Solidarity is really the only way to make any meaningful change anywhere in the world,” Nathan notes. “So we’re doing it here on Pico Boulevard.”

Hanson and Nathan were joined by fellow former BONES showrunners Jonathan Collier and Michael Peterson, as well as former BONES scribes including Elizabeth Benjamin (who helped coordinate the reunion), Dean Lopata, and Nkechi Okoro Carroll, as well as stars Emily Deschanel (Brennan), Eugene Byrd (Clark), Pej Vahdat (Arastoo), Ryan Cartwright (Vincent Nigel-Murrary), and Andrew Leeds (Pelant). Former BONES director Chad Lowe and a gaggle of guest stars and former crew members were also there to show their support.

#Bones fan @Yeseniavargas96 had @emilydeschanel sign her B.S. in anthropology degree at today’s picket. 💕💕💀 pic.twitter.com/K0QAY9ws9V

— Marisa Roffman (@marisaroffman) July 7, 2023

Fans also joined in walking the picket line, with one dressed in a replica of Brennan’s Jeffersonian jacket, and several others coming up from San Diego. One fan who studied anthropology had Deschanel sign her degree; others spoke to the actors about memorable storylines or told the writers how much their work had meant to them.

With a number of labor movements afoot, “I think this is something that everyone who works for a living is going to have to do in the next 50 years—save themselves from a gig economy,” Hanson notes. “And to do that, you need unions, and you need unions and guilds…Otherwise, we’re all going to be living our lives with some version of driving Uber, using our own cars to drive people around…They’re destroying the career of being a television writer from cradle to grave, a newbie coming in can’t rise in the same way.”

“And maybe they don’t want writers to do that,” he continues. “Maybe we’re too difficult; I don’t know. But I feel like we’re on the sharp edge of the spear for [a] labor movement that’s going to be repeat[ing] itself over and over with other companies.”

“I think we’re already seeing it,” Nathan, who has picketed in New York and LA, adds. “I’ve been in one strike or another with the Writers Guild since ’78. And this is the first time that I have ever seen all the other unions come in and support us. I mean, we had hotel workers coming in.”

“Teamsters,” Hanson interjects. “God bless the Teamsters.”

“They’re all supporting us because they’re next—everybody’s next,” Nathan concludes. “No matter what union it is, this country is trying to shut them down.”

And getting to reunite with their BONES family on the picket line—more than six years after the show ended—was the icing on the cake.

“It makes you a little weepy, even seeing everybody in one place,” Hanson says. “We’re all in touch a lot, by chains and stuff, on and off. But to see everybody in person in one place, it’s really kind of emotional.”

“It’s very emotional,” Nathan adds. “It’s amazing to see how close we still are. It’s like that friend you meet 25 years later and you realize that the friendship just picks up where it left off. It was a phenomenal group of people [and] a wonderful experience.”

RELATED:

• FBI’s John Boyd Shares His Future Crossover Hopes, Dishes on That Quasi-BONES Reunion
• Celebrating BONES’ 15th Anniversary
• The BONES Cast on the Scenes They Wish They Were in, the Mistake that Made it to Air

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