Tom Mison and Emily Deschanel in the special "The Resurrection in the Remains" BONES/SLEEPY HOLLOW crossover

Question: How did the idea for the BONES / SLEEPY HOLLOW crossover start?

Clifton Campbell: When we started putting the room together, Dana Walden [Co-Chairman/CEO, Fox Television Group] had a great idea to see what kind of marriage between the two shows we could possibly come up with -- to see if, compatability-wise, we could pull an evening together in a very fun and very promotable way. Jon [Collier] and Michael [Peterson] on their side [BONES] and me and my team over here were at first certainly challenged by the idea of doing something like that, but within that challenge find a great deal of fun in pairing the two. We pitched a few things out; we came up with some ideas. The network landed on the idea of making it a big Halloween/pre-Halloween promotional idea, and then we got to work.

Jonathan Collier: I have very little to add to that. I think we went through similar processes. Michael and I had never done a crossover before. Had you done one Clifton?

Clifton Campbell: Yes, I did one years ago on PROFILER and THE PRETENDER. It was somewhat easier, because one of them wasn't a supernatural show and the other one grounded in reality. It also involved only bringing one actor from each cast over and not a pairing. I found this one [BONES/SLEEPY HOLLOW] infinitely more challenging, and therefore more entertaining.

Jonathan Collier: I would agree with that.

Nicole Beharie in the special "The Resurrection in the Remains" BONES/SLEEPY HOLLOW crossover

Question: Was it easier to put SLEEPY HOLLOW in BONES or BONES in SLEEPY HOLLOW?

Jonathan Collier: Oh, boy. Clifton, please correct me. I would say it's intrinsically harder to put SLEEPY HOLLOW in BONES because we don't acknowledge that the supernatural exists. For our characters, it is not a reality, and for SLEEPY HOLLOW both science and the supernatural exist. We had to have a story where both elements could co-exist.

Clifton Campbell: I have to give that one up to Jon. That was a tightrope act that they had to pull off. We were able to put our heads together and come up with a terrestrial crime that on second look had a supernatural bent that we were able to take off in our hour [on SLEEPY HOLLOW's episode] and solve on our side of it. It was challenging, I'm sure, for those guys to try and deal with the realities of our show inside their own.

Jonathan Collier: The advantage that we had was that we got to use these very, very well developed and fully realized characters from SLEEPY HOLLOW and use them in our show. It wasn't like we were starting from scratch.

Question: So you see either team making use of the other in the future?

Jonathan Collier: We'd love it! The whole experience -- it was challenging but extremely rewarding.

Clifton Campbell: As daunting as the idea was initially, working through it with the BONES team was a great deal of fun -- just from the writers' perspective. And I think the product grew exponentially from those mutual conversations. I agree with Jon, I would love to do another one.

Tom Mison and Emily Deschanel in the special "The Resurrection in the Remains" BONES/SLEEPY HOLLOW crossover episode

Question: Can you talk about the Brennan/Crane and Booth/Abbie pairings in the crossover episode?

Jonathan Collier: I will start with Brennan and Crane and maybe you [Clifton] can do Booth and Mills. It was incredibly fun for us to get Crane on our show, because -- correct me if I'm wrong, Clifton -- it's a figure of the enlightenment element that Crane has. He's an educated man, but from another century, who probably would be like Brennan than not if he had been born in our time.

Clifton Campbell: It was fun to watch that relationship develop through a couple of passses of both scripts. There is a real similarity, albeit more from the intellectual point of view than the visceral side.

On the Abbie Mills/Booth side, they are both FBI agents. The interesting part for our side was that Booth is a veteran agent and someone who takes the job and wears it like a second skin very seriously. Abbie's brand-new to the Bureau and has heard of Booth's name. It was sort of a natural, organic hand-off from one show to the other using the Bureau connection and the FBI investigation. It really gave us some stuff to play with seeing the veteran sort of help out and support the person new to the job. On Abbie's side of it, it was a real personal connection and a personal journey to be able to see her see through the eyes of somebody who has found a work/life balance in a very unique way in his relationship with and marriage to Brennan. But also a little wink to the audience -- if you squint your eyes, you can see downrange the questions, the challenges and the opportunities that would present a pairing like Crane and Abbie in the relationship journey of Brennan and Booth.

Jonathan Collier: I think beyond the characters, it worked so well with the actors.

Clifton Campbell: Yeah, it really did. They got along great. It was fun to watch.

Jonathan Collier: You could see it on the screen.

David Boreanaz and Emily Deschanel in the special "The Resurrection in the Remains" BONES/SLEEPY HOLLOW crossover episode 

Question: Jonathan, what would you say to SLEEPY HOLLOW fans turning into BONES for the first time?

Jonathan Collier: Watch your characters get challenged in a way that you haven't seen before. I think we're pulling them out of their comfort zone, not that they've ever really been in one -- that's the virtue of the show. We're opening up a type of mystery that couldn't be told on SLEEPY HOLLOW. Our characters would never ever be able to an episode on our show like they've been able to do in SLEEPY HOLLOW.

Question: Clifton, what would you say to BONES fans turning into SLEEPY HOLLOW for the first time?

Clifton Campbell: On our side, we always have the struggle with accountability and this bubble we've created on SLEEPY HOLLOW. There's so much supernatural and unexplained going on around the police procedural aspect of our show and we don't want to open that door to the rest of the world. Having this much contact with the agency to meet all agencies -- with The Jeffersonian and their crew -- was really challenging. I think if fans from BONES continue with the storyline and see how we're able to use and utilize the expertise in BONES, they'll see a fun exchange and really sort of confound the storyline in an interesting way.

TJ Thyne and Emily Deschanel in the special "The Resurrection in the Remains" BONES/SLEEPY HOLLOW crossover

Question: What was it like when the crews for the two shows came together?

Clifton Campbell: The BONES side -- Jon and Michael and their crew -- were hosts. They were wonderful hosts. We actually shot all of the crossover scenes here in Los Angeles. SLEEPY HOLLOW shoots in Atlanta, so we traveled our cast and our keys -- the key department heads and the people who make our show really hum. We were welcomed with wide open arms, and it felt in terms of the crew -- and certainly the cast -- that everybody was enjoying the experience and rising to the challenge.

Jonathan Collier: You guys could not have better guests. You never know what to expect. It could have been any number of things, but it wildly exceeded our expectations.

Clifton Campbell: It was a real joy to be on your set, and our cast -- and certainly our crew -- melded very nicely with your's. In down times when we were tweaking, writing and what-not, I caught everybody -- both cast and crews sort of mingling in a really nice way. It felt really good, and it really does show in the end product.

Question: What about the experience surprised and delighted you most?

Clifton Campbell: For me, it was the little things that the cast found that were between the lines of the dialogue and the moments that they filled in for us. On their own shows, actors do that on a regular basis -- they give you extra moments and little looks that you can pull into the scenes that really resonate with the scenes. In just the four days the cast was together, they found those moments intermingled with themselves. Jon, I don't know if you felt the same way, but we kept a lot of those interesting little moments in the final cut.

Jonathan Collier: I would say the same thing. Beyond that, it was just the level of excitement that they brought to it. They were just thrilled to do it. It was fun for them from start to end. They made it fun for each other.

Clifton Campbell: It's always nice to shake things up creatively. These are very clearly defined franchises. To some extent, that's the job to perpetuate that franchise week in and week out. When you get an opportunity to mix it up as we did, you could really feel the excitment.

Jonathan Collier: And we shook it up across the board, which is nice, too. The way it worked was that SLEEPY HOLLOW brought their keys in. They brought their key grip, electric, hair and makeup, but they all worked with our crew under them.

Clifton Campbell: It was across the board a lot of fun.

Jonathan Collier: We even mixed up the writing rooms.

Clifton Campbell: That's true. We traveled over there and we spent some time in your writers' room. It was a lot of fun.

  Tamara Taylor, Emily Deschanel and TJ Thyne in the special "The Resurrection in the Remains" BONES/SLEEPY HOLLOW crossover

Question: What specific writing challenges did you face integrating the two shows?

Clifton Campbell: That was the part that, at first, was the most daunting, but ultimately ended up being the most rewarding. Because they are so totally different, the challenges became how do we get these characters to do and say the things we need to do mesh and still stay true to the characters and the voices and the tone of the show. It was a great deal of exchange back and forth between our writers' room and the BONES writers' room on how what sort of plot would platform and make the differences as seemless as possible, yet take full advantage of the tonal shift. I found, on our side of it, that to be the challenging thing in all the right ways.

Jonathan Collier: I totally agree. In our show, we have the worlds of brilliance, scientists and investigators. How do you have them be unaware of one reality that's very aware to another set of characters in the same show. It was very gratifying to work with the SLEEPY HOLLOW team to come up with a solution to that. The case is solved to the satisfaction of our characters and it also adds another dimension to their's.

Clifton Campbell: Ultimately -- and it was always intended in script -- because the actors were having such a good time mixing it up with each other, my takeaway at the end of the end of the second hour is that I would really like to see them do this again. There's a little bit of wink to the audience that something like that is certainly possible.