Skull and Bones on the small screen

If you can’t get enough about Yale’s secret societies, there’s good news for you: some time in the foreseeable future, there may be two television dramas about the storied Skull and Bones society for you to follow.

Deadline Hollywood reported this week that director Rob Reiner is working on a series for the USA Network about a late-1960s Yale student “who is recruited by the CIA to become a mole in the secret Skull and Bones society.” (It would hardly seem necessary, given the overlap in membership, but whatever.) The series is being written by Aaron Tracy ’04MA and Andrew Lewchinski.

Just last fall, we learned that Secrets of the Tomb—the 2002 nonfiction book about Bones by Alexandra Robbins ’98—was being turned into a series for ABC called The Order, which will tell the story of a Boneswoman-turned-FBI-agent who investigates a crime linked to her society past.

It sounds as if these shows—like the ludicrous 2000 film The Skulls—will play to the widespread paranoid fantasies about Bones and its ilk. But wouldn’t it be more fun for Reiner—the director of This Is Spinal Tap, after all—to take a mockumentary approach? Let’s look in on some realistic society meetings: I think what the world really needs to see is hours of Yale students telling their society mates how hard it was to move to a new school in seventh grade.

Oh, and if you still can’t get enough about secret societies, take our quiz.

___________________________________________

The Yale Alumni Magazine is published by Yale Alumni Publications Inc., an alumni-based nonprofit that is not run by Yale University. Its content does not necessarily reflect the views of the university administration.