July 6, 2008

‘Burn Notice’ Returns

An Idiot Boxing Special Edition

One of last summer’s best shows returns for its second season on Thursday. USA Network’s Burn Notice follows ex-spy Michael Westen (Jeffrey Donovan), who has been “burned” (hence the title) by his former employers. That means they’ve stranded him in Miami with no money, no job, no contacts—he has to make due with the support of an old friend (Bruce Campbell), an ex-girlfriend (Gabrielle Anwar) and, sometimes, his mother (Sharon Gless). Since Michael has no other skills to fall back on, he finds himself doing odd jobs to help ordinary people solve extraordinary problems.

The first season did an excellent job of combining comedy and spy thriller. Creator Matt Nix has crafted some great characters, well-played by the cast (all of whom have great chemistry with one another—put them in any combination, and the scene will make you laugh). More than that, Nix and his writers look at the human side of spycraft. In voiceover, Michael makes observations and explanations about how, for instance, spies are trained to spend hours waiting around or utilize specific kinds of ammunition for different tasks. I don’t know if any of these insights have a basis in reality, but they feel authentic.

Last season’s cliffhanger had Michael finally being led to the person who burned him; on faith alone, he drove into the back of a truck, which would then take him to a secret location. Not surprisingly, the premiere picks up from there. The mysterious voice on the phone (who, we’ll discover by episode two, is played by Battlestar Galactica’s Tricia Helfer) forces Michael into a jam, then threatens to kill him if he doesn’t get out of it. Along for the ride is a computer nerd (Patrick Fischler, who’s always great) with whom Michael has to work to steal data from a security company’s computers.

From there, it’s a pretty typical episode of Burn Notice—except with the stakes raised higher. Instead of helping good people for some sort of unspoken karmic atonement, Michael’s helping not-so-good people with the lingering threat of death hanging over his head. The writers have laid down some new ideas that will hopefully play out over the course of this season—obviously the subplot with Helfer is a big one. The second episode introduces some new conflict between Michael and his mother that will hopefully provide Gless a bigger, less thankless role than she had in the first season. They also dropped some hints that Bruce Campbell’s Sam Axe is yearning for a more well-rounded life than acting as a boy-toy for wealthy socialites and hanging around with Michael (who is, apparently, his only friend).

This looks like another great season. The writers have done an effective job of raising the stakes and making Michael’s “missions” more difficult—but while they do that, they’re digging deeper into characters who were pretty interesting and entertaining to begin with.

If you managed to miss Burn Notice’s first season or want to refresh your memory, get ready to set your TiVo or VCR: USA is rerunning most of the first season (eight episodes of 12) on July 10th, from 8:30 a.m.-4:30 p.m. Eastern. That leads up to the show’s second-season premiere at 10 p.m. If you like good TV, do yourself a favor and check it out.

D. B. Bates is a film critic and television viewer who has often shouted at fictional characters who probably wouldn’t listen to him even if they could hear him and existed in reality. Interested in explaining to D. B. the many ways he got it wrong? E-mail him.

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