Series · Prime Video · 2005

Bones

Work and, eventually, a marriage. The bodies are the price of entry.

Temperance Brennan is great at a hard job and bad at people, and the series lets the job stay great while she learns the people. That is a better arc than House, because it does not bless the coldness. The cost is the weekly corpse. If you can keep the corpse from becoming your comfort watch, the partnership is a fair story.

The eight

Industry
7/10
The lab is a real craft, respected.
Household
6/10
They end as a family. The show is patient about it.
Piety
2/10
She begins without a creed. The partner and the child complicate that.
Courage
5/10
They stay with the dead until the dead have a name.
Republic
4/10
The Bureau and the lab. Institutions that function.
Temperance
4/10
A murder a week is still a diet.
Truth
6/10
The unnamed body is given back a story. That is the decent core.
Stewardship
5/10
A child arrives, and the work has to make room.

Live historicallyDo your work carefully enough that a stranger would be glad you were the one who touched it.

Series · Prime Video · 2019

Evil

The rare show that allows both a clinical explanation and a real evil. It also cannot resist the gross-out.

The premise is the right one for this desk: some horrors are illness, some are malice, some are both, and a serious person does not decide in advance. The series then punches itself in the face with a sequence whose only purpose is to be unwatchable. Use the premise. You do not have to finish the series to keep it.

The eight

Industry
6/10
Assessment is the job: interviews, records, a method.
Household
4/10
A mother of daughters. The home is where the cases leak.
Piety
6/10
A priest who believes, and a Church that is not only a villain.
Courage
6/10
They take the next case.
Republic
4/10
Institutions fail in particular ways, not as a single sneer.
Temperance
2/10
It adds a shock it does not need, often enough to stain the premise.
Truth
7/10
It refuses the rule that everything eerie must be explained away.
Stewardship
4/10
The daughters are the stake, when it remembers them.

Live historicallyWhen something is wrong in a house, consider the ordinary cause first and do not swear that the ordinary cause is the only kind.