Photo Illustration by Luis G. Rendon/The Daily Beast/ABC/CBS/Pixabay
When Bones ended its 12-year-long run one Tuesday night in 2017, the finale signified more than just the conclusion of a beloved TV show. The FOX series, about a quirky forensic anthropologist and a cocky FBI agent who investigate murders together and eventually fall in love, was the last of the long-running romantic crime dramedies on network television.
A beloved mainstay of network TV since the days of Moonlighting’s Hayes and Addison and The X-Files’ Mulder and Scully, the romantic crime series dominated the broadcast scene until the late 2010s, when the shows began to slip off of traditional broadcast radars.
Following the finales of CBS’s The Mentalist and ABC’s Castle, similar series—including Take Two (the Castle EPs next romantic crime caper) and The Catch (Shondaland’s take on the sub-genre)—failed to take off. By the turn of the decade, crime shows that focused specifically on the relationship between the two leads had mostly disappeared from the lineup in favor of straight-forward procedurals and ensemble series with auxiliary romances.