In honor of Father's Day this weekend, we wanted to celebrate 10 of our favorite dads of TV crime. Half are crime-fighters, half are criminals, but each dad leaves an indelible mark (and dirty socks).
1) Jack Bauer of 24
Being a member of his family is like having a giant, flashing neon bullseye painted on you, but once you're being tormented by villains, to save you, he will do Whatever. It. Takes. (Until the next day...)
2) Arlo Givens of Justified
He's a vicious, abusive father who'd rather see his lawman son dead than his co-conspirators. But when Raylan goes all steely and ruthless with no hint of give, it's easy to see what the marshal's nature owes to Arlo's testicular fortitude.
Halloween is almost here. Some friends and I decided we needed to create, borrow, and adapt beverages for our favorite Halloween crime classics—both books and TV shows. We got together to mix and test the drinks below. So grab a cocktail shaker and your favorite Halloween crime fiction novel or DVD and let’s get started. 
Back to school means the return of many of our favorite TV shows. 
The world is in love with methods of forensic crime detection. We have been entranced by CSI (the original) and every spin-off it has produced. Abby Sciuto and her mass spectrometer add immeasurably to the strength of the Navy-based NCIS series, not to mention the ubiquitous Dr. Donald “Ducky” Mallard and his scalpel and keen insight into the human mind. Even the popular, fictional forensic television series Bones has ventured into the JFK assassination with the episode, “The Proof in the Pudding.”
’m uniquely qualified to discuss this series; not because the main character shares my surname, or because I’ve read nearly every Kathy Reichs book, or even because I’ve seen every episode of the television series. It’s because I watched all seven seasons in less than four months, finishing only days before the second half of season seven started.
We haven’t spent a lot of time on the forensic crime show Bones recently here at Crime HQ, but we felt we really couldn’t let this week’s episode go by withouth a mention. Not when the long-awaited Booth-baby has finally arrived! Luckily, over on our sister site, 
It’s funny to think that not too many years ago, TV was filled with straight-up police procedurals. They had always been with us, of course, going back to Dragnet (generally regarded as Hollywood’s first cop show) , and on through Police Story, Hill Street Blues, NYPD Blue and of course to Law and Order and its many clones. True, throughout that time we had PI shows (The Rockford Files, Magnum P.I., Spenser for Hire), and action-oriented crime solving (The A-Team, Maguyver, Charlie’s Angels), and certainly more than one amateur sleuth hour ( Diagnosis Murder, Murder She Wrote, Jonathan Creek), but even they were fairly prosaic in nature: “Help, Crime!” “Don’t worry, I’ll solve it, I’m a surgeon/mystery writer/magician.” “Okay, cool, thanks.”
The sixth season of FOX’s Bones ended with Angela and Hodgins’ baby being born, and in keeping with the whole nativity theme, Brennan revealing to Booth that she was pregnant, and that he’s the father. After a season where we saw Brennan showing some real regret over rejecting Booth’s declaration of love, and where Booth asked his new girlfriend Hannah to marry him (and being rejected), seeing these two tied together through a shared child was at once fitting, and at the same time, frustrating. For those of who have been shipping for these two to get together for a while now, having their consummation happen off screen seemed painfully like Mulder and Scully redux.
Television today is filled with strong women crime fighters. Detective Kate Beckett on Castle, Deputy Chief Brenda Leigh Johnson on The Closer and Dr. Temperance Brennan on Bones are prime examples. But where would these women be without their devoted male sidekicks, and what qualifications are necessary to get the job done (besides, of course, being ruggedly handsome)? More importantly, who would you rather partner with to fight crime: Richard Castle, Fritz Howard or Seeley Booth?
For those disappointed in the short season Bones will have this year due to Emily Deschanel’s pregnancy (six episodes in the fall, seven in the spring, with the spinoff, The Finder, holding the space in the winter), some good news from Fox: they will be producing four “bonus” episodes as well. That will bring the total number of episodes to seventeen rather than thirteen. No one seems sure exactly how the episodes will function, so they probably won’t advance the overall story arc. Instead, they will function as standalone episodes that might be popped into holes in Fox’s schedule or possibly as a mini-season after season seven ends.
In 
Years ago, before I had children, I worked for a large bookstore chain. I read everything that looked even slightly interesting, and I developed a love for crime stories. I carried that appreciation into my movie and television viewing. Mysteries are great, right? They puzzle your brain, and if the solution can be found in less than sixty minutes (or less than two hours for films), then it’s satisfying. No staying up until 6am in order to barrel through a novel. Just one hour with commercials and done.
Another odd idea that seemed to have become accepted as fact was that television audiences didn’t read. (Radio audiences were a different matter entirely—The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy, for example, began as a radio program.) Television audience went to the movies—after all, both were visual media—so they could be trusted to attend Star Trek movies or The Blues Brothers (which started out as a Saturday Night Live skit), but they weren’t likely to actually read books based on television shows.
Bones usually has catchy tunes playing on its soundtrack every week but if there’s one song to convey season six’s entire arc, it’d have to be David Bowie’s “Changes,” because that’s exactly what almost every character experienced this past year. Maybe the creators had that earworm, too, because the season finale was titled “The Change in the Game.” Watch
The penultimate episode of Bones Season 6, “The Hole in the Heart,” brought an end for one character even as it hinted at a possible new beginning for Booth (David Boreanaz) and Brennan (Emily Deschanel).
