Considering Hollywood’s slavish obsession with little golden statuettes, it comes as a shock to hear a showrunner admit that he isn’t chasing peer recognition or industry-wide kudos.
“When I was a kid, there were a lot of shows on the air that were good-natured, entertaining, fun-to-watch shows like ‘Magnum PI,’ ” says Hart Hanson, creator of Fox’s new series, “The Finder.”
“They were not rolling in Emmys or anything, but they were just fun to watch for an hour and that’s what we were aiming at” with “The Finder,” a spinoff of Hanson’s long-running Fox series, “Bones.”
Set in an out-of-the way Florida Key, the new comedy-drama-detective series stars Geoff Stults as Walter Sherman, an Iraq War veteran with explosion-induced brain damage that’s left him with both extreme paranoia and a super-human-like ability to find anything that’s been lost. His “legal advisor” and BFF is Leo (Michael Clarke Duncan), who makes Herculean efforts at keeping the exceedingly quirky Walter grounded while he’s out finding things for clients.
Like “Bones,” which used Kathy Reichs’ forensics thrillers as a jumping-off point, “The Finder” is loosely based on a pair of novels — Richard Greener’s suspenseful “Locator” series, about a near-retirement-age guy living in the Caribbean and tracking things down, just like he did in ’Nam.
As was also the case with “Bones,” Hanson tweaked “The Finder’s” source material to make it more TV-friendly.
“I grabbed on to the idea of a fellow who can find things and came up with the paranoia that you can get from being blown up … [being] streamed toward something useful and entertaining,” Hanson says.
Which explains the bizarre things that Walter does in the course of an investigation, like stretching out in the middle of an airport tarmac or lying — in his underwear — in a dead man’s bed.
“He does things that appear wackadoodle to everyone around him, but it’s just the way he feels out the situation,” Hanson explains, adding that the writers call it “ ‘The Finder moment’ — how does he do it in a way that a cop would not?”
While it’s all fun and weirdness in the sun, Walter’s got a ticking time bomb of a problem.
“He is compelled to find,” Hanson says. “Once he agrees to find something and goes on the trail, he’s like a bloodhound that’ll run himself to the death to find it.
“By the end of the season, we will explore what might happen if Walter can’t find something, or if something is, in fact, unfindable.”
A case with potentially disastrous results comes up when “Bones’ ” resident conspiracy theorist, Dr. Hodgins (TJ Thyne), asks Walter to track down a suspected UFO.
“We knew that [‘The Finder’] would live in the same universe as ‘Bones,’ which is not the universe you walk into when you leave the house in the morning,” Hanson says.
“It’s a heightened universe where goofy and strange things happen.”