David Boreanaz's New Netflix Action Thriller Is His Biggest Role Since Bones

Published Aug 22, 2026, 4:30 PM EDT After joining Screen Rant in January 2025, Guy became a Senior Features Writer in March of the same year, and now specializes in features about classic TV shows. With several years' experience writing for and editing TV, film and music publications, his areas of expertise include a wide range of genres, from comedies, animated series, and crime dramas, to Westerns and political thrillers. Netflix has just added a major action thriller to its roster, by releasing the biggest role of David Boreanaz’s stellar TV career since Bones on its platform this week. Boreanaz is best-known for portraying FBI Special Agent Seeley Booth in Fox’s forensic crime procedural, as well as vampire PI Angel in Buffy the Vampire Slayer and its spinoff. However, the part that’s kept him on our screens over the past decade is Master Chief Special Warfare Operator Jason Hayes in SEAL Team, a high-octane military drama about the most elite unit in the American armed forces. David Boreanaz leads from the front as the head of Bravo Team, as his protagonist combines tactical brilliance with emotional vulnerability. More than any other character in the series, Hayes embodies the psychological toll that special ops missions can take on even the most elite soldiers. There was no way SEAL Team could continue for an eighth season once Boreanaz decided to leave, but many Netflix subscribers are only now discovering its 114 episodes for the first time. In any case, the actor’s legacy on the series was already complete by the time it concluded in 2024. It will always remain one of Boreanaz’s defining TV roles, and it’s easy to see why. SEAL Team’s mix of gritty realism, all-action thrills, technical accuracy, and high-stakes personal drama is enough to get almost any viewer hooked. SEAL Team Is David Boreanaz’s Defining Role Of The 2020s David Boreanaz became a household name in the late 1990s through his performance as the first love of Buffy Summers in Buffy the Vampire Slayer, before getting his own spinoff series, Angel. Since then, he’s chosen his follow-up roles carefully. Boreanaz is still among the biggest TV stars of the 21st century, despite having just three major roles to speak of. SEAL Team’s Jason Hayes is the most recent of these roles, and arguably the most important character in a military TV series in the last 10 years. Hayes exemplifies what his show is all about better than anyone else. While he isn’t a maverick military strategist, his obstinate self-belief, combined with his seemingly untouchable status among the heavily centralized leadership of Navy SEALs Special Warfare subunit Bravo Team, means that he frequently treads the fine line between asset and liability to the force he commands. He’s a flawed, complex character, who’s clearly picked up a few demons from decades of elite warfare. Now is the perfect moment for a new generation of military thriller fans to discover David Boreanaz’s searing performance as Hayes on Netflix. Ahead of Boreanaz’s part in a Rockford Files reboot, SEAL Team is the show that’s dominated the past nine years of his career. Bones Was The Last TV Show To Garner Boreanaz Similar Attention Besides Buffy, Angel, and SEAL Team, though, there’s another series that’s shaped our view of the actor more than anything else. It’s no wonder that Boreanaz himself wants a Bones revival, given the 12 seasons he spent as one of the show’s two lead actors. His character Seeley Booth is one half of a winning odd-couple dynamic alongside Emily Deschanel’s Temperance Brennan, which sets Bones apart as a uniquely inventive homicide investigation drama. The endearingly comedic dynamic between Booth and Brennan, who are from different worlds and couldn’t be less alike, kept viewers glued to this crime series for more than a decade. But when Bones ended, Boreanaz already had another lead role in a prospective new TV show lined up, which itself ended up running for the best part of a decade. SEAL Team isn’t as witty or charming as the series he worked on before it, but it delivers thrills with a level of intensity beyond Seeley Booth’s wildest dreams. SEAL Team Release Date 2017 - 2024-00-00 Network CBS, Paramount SEAL Team is a military drama that follows the professional and personal lives of the most elite unit of Navy SEALs as they train, plan, and execute high-stakes missions. Bones Release Date 2005 - 2017-00-00 Network FOX Bones is a crime drama series centered around Dr. Temperance Brennan, a forensic anthropologist at the Jeffersonian's Medico-Legal Lab, who, along with Special Agent Seeley Booth, solves murder cases involving severely decomposed remains that defy standard identification methods.