Why You Should Be Watching Burn Notice
When it comes to spy shows and movies, there are a few different styles. There’s the Tom Clancy kind of spies—patriots who do the best they can for their families, are incredibly honorable, handsome, and badass (except when they’re corrupt), and go home to their decent, hardworking families. (Despite how it sounds, I do enjoy the occasional Tom Clancy novel—it’s just that he’d have to flesh out his characters considerably to get them to two-dimensional.) Then there’s the 24 type of spies—some action, some inside-agency stuff. These aren’t so much spies as, “intelligence operatives.” When not involved in dramatic world-saving, they seem to exist mainly to appeal to people who like to tell themselves that they could have been a great CIA analyst. And then there are the James Bonds. Multi-tasking super-men who are expert marksmen and Olympic-level martial artists and yet still know how to tango and speak eight languages. You know, the hyper-realistic model.
Burn Notice (on USA Network Thursday nights) borrows a little from the classic formulas, with a bit of A-Team and MacGyver thrown in for good measure. The show centers on Michael Westen, a former spy who has been “burned” and is now stuck in Miami with no job, money, or prospects, and a lot of old enemies. He splits his time between pursuing the people who burned him and doing A-Team/urban Robin Hood jobs for people in need of that kind of help. (Nearly all of whom have ended up the victim of some criminal enterprise.) Helping him out are his on-again/off-again girlfriend, Fiona (a former IRA explosives expert and very cute if a bit skinny), and the awesomely cool Bruce Campbell playing Sam Axe the buddy/former SEAL/military intelligence guy who is now a washed-up drunk living off of wealthy women. But in a charming way.
There are two things that make Burn Notice stand out from the old formulaic spy stuff. Most interesting is the world that they’ve created for Michael and his friends to operate in. It’s very reminiscent of the Elmore Leonard/Ross Thomas style of the dark culture of criminals, con men, and covert operatives—where spies , arms dealers, and heroin smugglers all operate in very similar worlds. Once again, the characters really make the difference—like Michael’s loving-but-manipulative mother or the arms dealers and money launderers who make occasional (very funny) appearances.
Then there are the voiceovers. As he takes down cartels, cons con men, and chases car thieves out of town, we are treated to narration from Michael giving us his various tips and tricks of the spy trade. This is where we learn that in the hierarchy of the criminal underworld, bank robbers are the rock stars while safecrackers are the artists . . . that cake fondant has a similar consistency to C4 . . . and how to tie up and confuse the people bugging your phone by making random and obscure calls to foreign embassies.
In the end, as in so many things, it all comes down to the writing. Burn Notice is a great show because the writers and producers have created interesting characters in a fun and interesting world and given them good dialogue. It seems so simple and yet so few shows manage to pull it off. I’ll put it this way. I recently found out that the creator of Burn Notice was tapped to write the script for the Hot Wheels Movie. (Yes, really. Someone is considering producing a Hot Wheels movie.) And it actually made me feel slightly optimistic about it. Insane? Possibly. But look what he did with the spy genre.