bones & canada: the biggest will they or won’t they since … well …

this is brennan's momface. // fox promotional photo

I guess I’ll add my two cents to the Bones and Canada confusion, because there seems to be a lot of it.

Let’s start with a little recap.  Bones has been preempted for the last two weeks because of baseball, and depending on who wins the game tomorrow night, it could get pushed another week, too.  (Go, Yankees!)

For about a year now, I guess, Bones has been airing on Thursday nights in America and on Wednesday nights in Canada, prompting many if not most episodes to hit the Internet before hitting American airwaves.  It has become a favorite pastime of American (and other non-Canadian) fangirls to find and watch the episodes beforehand; in all likelihood, this is the most dangerous criminal activity in which most of us will ever participate.  (One could even liken us to Brennan herself, whose biggest transgression so far has been dining and dashing–and Booth paid behind her back.)  But speaking of American pastimes …

Because we don’t know whether or not Bones will air in America this Thursday, we also don’t know whether or not it will air in Canada tomorrow.  While it would be a treat to see it tomorrow night, I’m guessing that it’s not going to end up on, and here’s why:

I don’t know how it works up there, but here, it’d be a big problem if, less than twenty-four hours before an episode was scheduled, there hadn’t been any promos for it and fans didn’t know whether or not it was going to be new.  This is precisely why Fox scheduled reruns of Glee for tomorrow night–that was the plan whether or not the Series ended in time.  (Glee won’t air at all tomorrow because of Game Six.)  They felt they wouldn’t have had enough time to promote the show between when the series would have ended (as early as Sunday night) and when the new episodes could have been scheduled.  Meanwhile, they’ve been promoting the hell out of Bones–during the World Series–with the almost-humorous “IF NO BASEBALL” tag at the end.

Yes, Global is in Canada and is not affiliated with Fox and doesn’t give a rat’s behind about baseball because they are far too busy fawning over the Queen and speaking French and getting free healthcare.  BUT.  20th Century Fox produces the show–they decide when and where it goes.

If this wasn’t true, Global would have already aired the next episode, right?  They’ve only been on a three-week hiatus because we’ve been on a three-week hiatus.

It seems like the way it works is that 20th Century Fox distributes the show episode by episode to their global markets.  They worked out a deal with Global to allow them to air Bones a day early.  I’m sure it doesn’t really affect viewership, since most of the American nuts who watch it online Wednesday nights end up catching it on Fox the next night anyway, purely to see David Boreanaz’s stubble in high definition.

But I imagine it would start to affect American audiences if it started airing on Global a whole week early.  20th Century Fox is probably unwilling to do that.  Why else do you think Canada’s episodes got so screwy last spring when Fox ended up airing, like, seven episodes in a three-week span?  (For those of you who don’t recall, Canadian episodes ended up airing way out of order to compensate for not being able to keep up with how quickly Fox was airing the last ten episodes of season four.)

So I bet what’s happening is 20th Century Fox has been trying to hold out on giving Global the go-ahead for tomorrow–I’m sure it would’ve been business as usual if the Yankees had already clinched the Series.  Now, it’s basically too late, and they’re not going to know whether or not Bones will air Thursday until late Wednesday–after the episode would have already aired in Canada.

The bottom line is that linking a production company to a network (see also: ABC & ABC Studios; NBC & NBC Universal) gives that network a huge advantage.  Yeah, sometimes it’s a bummer that the Canadians get to see Boreanaz’s stubble a whole day before we do, but at the end of the day, it’s the American audiences who benefit.  We always see episodes in the canonical order, we don’t have our schedules messed with by sports we don’t care about (did you know there’s such a thing as Canadian football?), and it’s our preemptions that affect everybody else.  It’s actually a very American system.

Hell, I’m just glad I’m not on another continent–you guys have it rough.