Burn Notice — Season 2

I love television shows with flawed first seasons: when a show debuts with unexpected critical (and maybe commercial) success -- Veronica Mars, The Sopranos, Lost -- subsequent seasons tend to fall short of unfair expectations. But a promising show with a good cast and some writing that needs smoothing often ramps up in its second season to justify its renewal: take Buffy the Vampire Slayer or The Simpsons, for instance. Burn Notice had the premise and the cast to warrant a second season, but its plots were too repetitious. But with the introduction of a potential story arc in the finale, I looked forward to seeing the writers tighten things up a bit.

The second season is indeed a notable step up from the first but, ironically, it's the weekly plots that made me tune in over the ongoing arc concerning the truth behind Michael's burning. Where the last season seemed to consist of little more than a string of cartel lieutenants, smugglers and the odd thug, here we deal with marks as varied as rap moguls and former spies, medical black marketeers and Russian mafiosos.


These standalone jobs allow the cast to solidify their excellent chemistry and to explore the characters further. Gabrielle Anwar's Fiona is the best ass-kicking female on TV since Battlestar Galactica came to an end and took Starbuck with it. I imagine someone will snatch the title from her if and when Dollhouse picks up steam, but for the moment no one can compare. Fi breaks off their sort-of relationship with Michael in the first episode of the new season, allowing her to build on her own. It's strange for a show to go from a relationship to a "will-they-won't-they" scenario and not the other way around, but it nicely allows both characters to flesh out their sexual tension while growingindependently of one another. Appropriate for such a character, we see Fi take cases involving abused or murdered kids and women to heart, which allows her to focus the fiery personality we got in the first season.

Jeffery Donovan only solidifies Michael Westen as a great TV character. Donovan's timing is even sharper, but now he adds his repertoire of terrible accents which make Mike even funnier. Bad accents are usually the sign of desperation in comedy, but Donovan does not play them up for laughs. By delivering them with Michael's stone face and confidence, the humor is that people buy those voices willingly. He also gets some nice moments with his mother that aren't quite as forced and obvious as the first season's. SharonGless sadly doesn't appear as often (though she's in most of the episodes), but she pulls off the chain-smoking heart of the show with aplomb. I also like the touch that Michael, whose career required him to be a master liar, can fool anyone but his mom.

Then, there's Campbell. I noted in my previous review that Campbell stole the show routinely in the first season but that he was still holding back his usual self a bit. Here, he gives himself some slack and the show reaps tons of gold from him. Campbell's status as a B-movie icon makes it easy to dismiss him as a face (and chin) instead of abona fide actor, but watch how quickly he can turn from flippant goofiness to chilling severity without a moment's pause and it's hard to write him off as just "Ash." His highlight, and indeed the highlight of the entire season, must be hisantagonizing of the vindictive rapper (played by Method Man) in "Bad Blood": in a 45-second spree of comic gold, Sam attempts to antagonize and trap the producer by insulting rap, professing his love for Kenny G and even attempting to rap himself. It's the funniest thing I've seen on television since JackDonaghy attempting group therapy with Tracy by acting out Sanford & Son on 30 Rock.

But apart from the humor and the character growth in these disconnected stories, the plots are simply excellent. Virgil, a fairly inconsequential character from the first season, returns to ask Michael for a favor, but we discover that Virgil might also be seeking to rekindle an oldrelationship with Madeline. "Double Booked" pits Michael against a former colleague who serves to give us an insight to the kind of person Michael might have been back when he was in the amoral spy game. "Bad Breaks" contains perhaps the most inspired of the weekly plots by mixing a heist with Home Alone. Featuring a guest spot by Firefly's own Mark Sheppard (Badger) as the lead robber, the episode makes Michael's attempts to foil the robbery and save hostages gripping even as you're laughing along with his constant mind games and sabotage.


The "Burn" story, by contrast, takes a while to get off the ground. That sensual, mysterious voice on the cell phone giving orders to Michael belongs to Carla (Battlestar Galactica's Tricia Helfer), who ostensibly got Michael burned so he would work for her and her organization. She seductively coerces Michael into completing his new assignments by threatening to kill his friends and family and all the usual stuff. Poor Mike: first he loses his spy job, and now he has sinister jobs forced upon him. It's a nice foil for the relatively mundane assignments he continues to take from those in need. Sadly,Helfer is given little to play with here; a shame, considering how well she perfectly the evil seductress on BSG. She actually loses some menace when we see her in person and she stops simply being the unseen voice.

Thankfully, we get a more hands-on villain to liven things up, though he doesn't get the face time he needs until the second half. The deranged spy "wrangler" Victor (Michael Shanks) impresses from the start, though; where Carla's wrangling consists of veiled threats delivered with the sinister tone of aprofessional , Victor looks and acts like he'd like nothing more than to go find Mike's friends and family and kill them himself. It's a damn shame that he drops out of the scene so soon after he first appears, but he comes back with a vengeance in the final stretch and really makes the arc work.

The finale isn't the finest episode of the season -- "Double Booked," "Rough Seas" and "Bad Breaks" are better -- but it's a step up from the last season's impressiveender and it sets up an even more promising future for the show. It's weird to think that I never bothered to wonder about Michael's old enemies, though theshow's fast pace wraps you up in the moment. The idea that we might see ghosts from Michael's past come to Miami looking for revenge is even more enticing than a shadow operation forcing Mike to do assignments for them.

Burn Notice's second season is a marked improvement all-around, one that elevates the show into an indispensable piece of fun rather than a cool show you can drift in and out of. Unlike the last season, it's difficult to pick any weak moments, as the addition of an arc gives each episode a second chance to redeemitself if a plot doesn't work. Now I just need to catch up with the new season on Hulu, and I can experience this wonderful series in real time. I hope waiting a week in between episodes doesn't hurt too much.

Burn Notice — Season 1

The first thing that grabs your attention in Burn Notice is its disturbingly incessant glamor shots of Miami, that fetid den of gauche architecture designed to make the entire city look like an ostentatious playground for the wealthy. Cityscape shots always suggest that a show will simply gloss over the real innards of the locale in favor of the grand Hollywood look. It's not the sort of thing that inspires confidence in a show, particularly one about a private investigator who must deal with the seedy aspects of city life.

About halfway through the pilot, however, the establishing shots will be the last thing on your mind. Burn Notice takes the familiar idea of the private eye and gives it a unique twist, but its greatest strength lies in its pitch-perfect main cast and their effortless rapport with one another. Whether the main plots hold your interest -- which they sadly fail to do in several of the season's 11 episodes -- the show is buoyed by the interactions of these off-beat but believable characters.


Michael Westen (Jeffrey Donovan), a freelance international spy, receives the titular burn notice while operating in Nigeria. As he explains in narration, you can't just fire a spy; you have to completely remove them from the grid. Suddenly, Michael's passport is flagged, his bank account frozen and his contacts unresponsive, leaving him to fend for himself with his cover blown. He shoots his way to an airport and wakes up in Miami, where he must reluctantly reconnect with his estranged mother while looking for a job to fit his particular skill set. Before long, he finds himself helping out needy people that allows him to use his intelligence background to investigate not terrorists, but small-time criminals (for a fee, of course).

There's something tantalizing about watching Westen trying to apply his sophisticated training on a shoestring budget, especially considering the people he must now spy on. In his previous line of work, he was someone working with unlimited resources, infiltrating poorly funded terrorist cells. Oh sure, such organizations make money through oil, drug, weapons trading and the like, but Michael just needed to keep his cover. Now he not only has to keep his cool; he has to take on criminals who are often well-connected in the richest parts of the city. Yes, he takes on his fair share of thugs, but the real villains are the higher-ups in drug cartels, the human traffickers, the gunrunners. It's a subtle inversion that makes Westen's quick thinking all the more impressive.

We get an insight into his thought process via his excellent voiceovers. Normally the downside of noir/detective stories, Burn Notice's narrations are reminiscent of Veronica Mars' in their wit and originality. Michael isn't telling us stuff we already know (or, worse, spoiling potential character development through easy exposition) but rather explains in quick, amusing bursts how people hiding in houses are always too busy worrying about shots coming through the door that they never worry about someone shooting through the weak plaster of the walls, or how to convince a suspicious mark to buy a cover I.D. These narrations add to both the comedy of the show as well as the technical details of the spy game.

But it wouldn't work nearly as well, if at all, without Donovan selling it. When it comes to television, most actors take a bit of time to find their characters. It's only natural, as the writers themselves take a bit of time to flesh them out: consider how much a Buffy or Fred Burkle or Jimmy McNulty changed in a single season, to say nothing of longer arcs. Yet Donovan is secure in his role from the start: his comic timing is as deadly as the weapons he's always brandishing, and he can sell any cover with a fearsome stone face.


Aiding Westen are two equally interesting characters, played by equally imbibing actors. Michael's ex-girlfriend Fiona (Gabrielle Anwar), formerly a member of the IRA, helps him get to Miami and provides the pretty face needed to distract the hired hands of the big players. Plus, she more than knows how to hold her own in a fight, to say nothing of her propensity to rig explosives on anything and everything. The only downside to her character is that she's defined mostly by her sexual tension and relationship with Michael even though she's clearly got enough personality and backstory to work as her own character. She also provides a nice foil for the other woman in Michael's life, his mother, Madeline (Sharon Gless). Michael ran away from home when he was 17 because of his abusive father, and his comical dealings with her and her mundane issues carry an undercurrent of mutual feelings of regret and betrayal that occasionally rise to the surface.

But it's Bruce Campbell, of course, who steals the show as schlubby, retired Navy SEAL Sam Axe. A mojito-loving lout with connections ranging from the Pentagon to the sports bar on the corner, Sam is the one who generally points Michael to his next assignment, always assuring his friend that it will be an "easy job" no matter how many times it turns out to be the opposite. Yet his relationship with Fi is even more rewarding, as the two detest each other, and their incessant insults provide much of the season's comedy. Campbell has a few moments of completely serious drama which he plays superbly, but the real treat is his absurd demeanor, which Campbell plays up like the B-movie master that he is. His shtick is fairly subdued here, either to make it to TV or because the writers haven't fully tapped into his gold mine of a persona, but he still stands out in this marvelous, small cast.

All three of the main players play off one another as if they've been doing it for years, and frankly they eclipse a great deal of the writing of this season. It's not that the scripts are bad, per se; they just bleed together after a time. Michael is hunting for the people who burned him, but that only substantially enters the story in isolated spots, though he's usually ducking cars filled with Feds or CIA agents. The finale, however, suggests the start of a solid arc to take the pressure off the slight same-y nature of the weekly criminals, which will hopefully give the actors something meaty to do aside from dazzling with their timing and interplay.

So, the writing weighs the season down, as does the direction, which is too stylized for its own good. Like Chuck's first season, these 11 episodes blur together in the middle and are clearly looking for a concrete direction. Chuck brings up a number of similarities, as both are spy shows with neat twists with characters that are more concretely defined than their surroundings; I find myself sticking with these shows because I loved these characters from the moment I saw them, and I'm willing to see more even if they do the same thing every week. Nevertheless, Burn Notice doesn't hit many blatantly sour notes, and some tighter scripts and toned-down camera editing are all this show really needs to take off in a big way.