I think "Too good to be true," is Mary Sue.

Which just boils down to how good is too good to be true? Is Temperance Brennan or anyone on her team or even Seeley Booth too good to be true? Charlie Eppes? James Bond? Jason Bourne? That's the line you have to walk with your original characters, I guess, but for conflict you can't have your original characters completely overshadowed by these people, and fans of canon can get really possessive and prickly.

Which just boils down to how good is too good to be true? Is Temperance Brennan or anyone on her team or even Seeley Booth too good to be true?

Hmm. I think to make it work you have to have two things - a why and a consequence. So Brennan is over the top good but it has something to do with serious childhood issues and it plays out badly in her personal life. Shawn on Psych might be another - he's able to do what he does though yes, innate talent, but also borderline abuse growing up and while he may not recognize it, boy is he fucked up.

Movie Bond doesn't meet this, book Bond possibly, though it's been a while. (I don't know the other examples you cite enough.) Which isn't to say that Brennan and Booth and I'm guessing most of them don't totally push the boundaries of believability. But it's when you get that kind of performance without the other elements that things get past where they can be handwaved.

I'm guessing most of them don't totally push the boundaries of believability

Charlie Eppes, from Numb3rs, had an idyllic childhood with a great family and can tie any real world problem to math and solve it, and is more talented than anyone else in his department.

I consider all of the guys on Bones to be insanely talented, even for TV, but they only made the forensic anthropologists emotionally stunted, and not even all of them. Someone like Hodgins is toting around more money than God, three PhDs, and is a pocket stud.

I don't see how you can write a sympathetic antagonist/new challenging protagonist for a setup like those (which were just the ones that came off the top of my head--I'd also include Leverage) that doesn't get really dicey with the too good thing, given that the canon characters already look like Mary Sues. What are you to do then?

So Brennan is over the top good but it has something to do with serious childhood issues and it plays out badly in her personal life.

I enjoy watching Bones for the interplay between the characters, but Brennan is totally over the top. She is in her low to mid-thirties (she actually stated her birth year in one episode, but I can't pull it off the top of my head) and yet she's already one of, if not the premier anthropologists in the world. She's also a bestselling mystery author, doing signings and tv interviews and one of her books is being made into a movie. She's gorgeous. She knows several forms of martial arts and how to use firearms. She is fearless when facing gangbangers and street thugs and maniacal bad guys. She manages to have an active sex life in between all her other responsibilities.

I know some of you are going to say she's based on Kathy Reichs, but even Reichs can't be all that and a bag of chips. Except for the extraordinarily rare examples of people like Misha Collins, nobody is all that Brennan is.

As for her personal life... I remember a time when people were actually questioning whether or not she had a form of high-level Asperger's because of her robotic reactions in a lot of social situations. Mostly I put it down to inconsistent writing. She lived with her brother and parents until she was 15, but she doesn't know who The Grinch is? She has no knowledge of popular culture milestones ("I don't know what that means") that she should have been exposed to. If she had been home schooled or otherwise isolated as a child it would make more sense, but that isn't the case. (That happens with her testifying in court, too. She spends a lot of time in court, that's part of her job, but we see her totally sucking at it. She has no understanding of how she comes across to the jury. She should, that's part of the job, and considering how important it is and how often we're supposed to think she is an asset, she would have to have learned to be better at it.)

The writers try a little too hard to set her apart. She's already inherently amazing, they don't need to try so hard to make her quirky. I'm interested to see if they actually have her go ahead with the baby idea.

I don't know "Bones", but one of the things annoying about Mary Sues also is the universally beloved thing...Laura Ballard on H:LOTS was a bit like this...her first week there she solves a multiple murder that kept FrankenTim guessing all summer, then she wins a commendation and even Munch tells everyone how great she is, and Tim Bayliss says she's sexy. I kind of always hated that character from that introduction. "Too good to be true" can be hard to define, especially when real life can be so...

I also think that it depends on the characters around them. The bar for "too good to be true" for Bones is higher, as everyone there is rather improbable. On H:LOTS, the bar is much closer to reality, so what would be "normal" in the Bones-verse would be unbelievable in the H:LOTS Baltimore.

I think some of it's down to the medium too: a character who's written as being basically a Mary Sue can be rendered a hell of a lot more believable and human by a good actor. They can sell someone as being more than the sum of their (too-good-to-be-true) parts. But in (fan)fiction, all you've got is the unamelliorated prose.

For that matter, I think that a written character could easily enough have a whole load of checklist points for MarySue without actually being a MarySue, because there ARE amazingly, implausibly gifted & attractive people (like, well, ita springs to mind, actually. And her mum, iirc) and a good writer can make their characters real and three dimensional even if they're remarkably gifted & heroic.

I wouldn't call Tempe or Charlie Eppes Mary Sues because I think the actors do a shitload of legwork in making them plausible (if exceptional) people. But I agree that certainly Brennan's writing has been contradictory, and they overplay the "I don't know what that means" card A LOT.

There's something about the realism of the world they're set in too. I mean, if you get right down to it there's very little that's plausible about the Bones 'verse, from the characters to the science to the crimes. So in that context, you have people who are skewed a little (okay a lot) more to the remarkable than you could get away with in, say, HLoTS.

(In Bones, I'd say Angela actually comes closest to the old authorial insertion type Mary Sue, as opposed to the simply way too good for plausibility.)

I'd say Angela actually comes closest to the old authorial insertion type Mary Sue

Her eyes are almost violet, it's true. It's hard to talk authorial insertion as a factor when the main character is based on the author, I guess.

If I'm going to write a new team member for the Jeffersonian, or Leverage or a friendly rival for Charlie Eppes, I just have to be damned good, it boils down to. Because it doesn't matter if I managed to avoid making it look like I want to be this character--the fact that I have to make them so good at everything the main character(s) is/are good at, plus likeable (and attractive, for the former two shows, I think) I'm on thin ice already.