A Place In This... TV Show?

I finished watching Leverage. It was splendid and amazing and the ending was everything I wanted it to be. After a few false starts I picked up Bones which Jonathan thought I would like. He was right, of course, and, because I’m me, I started putting the shows next to each other, sizing them up.

Not  comparing the shows. No, that would be silly. One is a heist show and the other’s about criminal anthropology. Other than the fact that they both feature a crime of the week, have a tacit understanding of the concept of family of choice, are made up of characters who are ridiculously good at what they do and star two actors who were also in Angel, they are two separate genres and deserve to be treated as such. No, what I was determining was where I might fit in the character maps.

I wrote about wanting to fit into Leverage some years ago. I would dig the post up, but that blog is currently down for the foreseeable future (hence the move to here) so I will simply recap. I said I wished I could be a member of the Leverage team and Seth said I wouldn’t fit because they were all too broken and sad. He asserted I am too happy and whole to belong with the likes of Nate Ford and the rest. Believe it or not, I found this upsetting because, really, who wouldn’t want to fit in with the ridiculously skilled family-of-choice who go after bad guys?

I eventually got over my upset and understood the compliment he was trying to pay. And now I’m contemplating Bones and, for all the I enjoyed Leverage so much more, on this particular scale Bones might be winning out because, in the midst of their team of ridiculous smart and capable, there stands Angela Montenegro.

Sure, she’s an artist who can recreate a person’s face from a clean skull, but that’s not the point. The point is that, in the midst of a bunch of nerdy scientists who lack some of the most fundamental people skills, she stands as a compassionate soul who understands her fellow man. She is caring, often less able to distance herself from the victim of the week, a true lover of beauty who is often hurt by the ugliness she sees around her. And the show treats her with respect for it. This caring is not a weakness. No, if anything she becomes the lab’s liaison with the outside world, facilitating some of the more delicate and tender interactions with people who have been hurt, traumatized or are confused.

She sat across a café table from the wife of a serial killer and I thought, “That would be me.” No, I don’t actually want that seat and, like I said, she is a genius with facial reconstruction, but the team had a place for the compassionate quasi-normal.

As someone who often feels aggressively average it’s just nice to know a TV show might have a place for me.