Wizard's Blog

Last year a new series called Burn Notice started on the USA Network.

I love this show. Basically the main character (Michael Westen) is a spy who gets “burned”. That basically means that his bosses don’t trust him anymore but they won’t go as far as killing him. He’s dropped off in Miami (because that’s where he was originally from) and told that he’s not allowed to leave. So basically the show consists of people asking him for help, and the local scumbags having no idea what they’re dealing with. FBI agents sent to keep an eye on him and hitmen sent by old enemies provide more of a challenge in case the locals are too easy. The larger story is who burned him and why.

It sounds like it could be a bit difficult for the writers to arrange believable situations where people need help, and he agrees and he wins, but it all works extremely well. The acting and directing are also superb. In fact, I can’t say there’s anything I don’t like about the show.

It’s billed as an “action comedy” which is a category I can’t say I’ve heard of before, but explosions and one-liners – who could ask for anything more 🙂

It’s difficult to say what I like so much about the show. I think part of it is that I enjoy it when a main character is really really good at whatever they do. I think of it as a Sherlock Holmes type character – someone who’s never wrong, who’s always a step ahead, who sees what everyone else misses.

Having said that, Westen does mess up sometimes and gets beaten up and bleeds, which is realism that I appreciate. I know, it seems like I want opposing, incompatible things from the show, but it delivers anyway.

I also really like the little voiceover bits he does. Basically he gives you tips on how to be a spy, and it’s usually something related to what’s happening in the episode. For example in one episode he hijacks a car, paying special attention to the fact that it doesn’t have airbags. Then he drives as fast as he can, head first into a bad guy’s car (which does have airbags). The bad guy gets knocked out by the airbag, and as Westen ties the man’s hands to the steering wheel with cable ties, his voiceover says something like “An airbag can save your life. But it will also knock you out long enough for someone to cable tie your hands to the steering wheel.” That had me laughing out loud.

None of the people I know have even heard of the show, which is a real shame. Possibly this is because the show is on USA which is a smaller network(?) I don’t really understand how American TV channels work. In any case, USA also make Monk and Psych – two other shows that I love – so I think they deserve more attention than they get.

Come to think of it, both Monk and Psych also have main characters that have that Sherlock Holmes feeling to them…

Another odd thing – Jeffrey Donovan (the actor who plays Michael Westen in Burn Notice) played the bad guy in a Monk episode (Mr. Monk and the Astronaut) so there’s a weird crossover.

Anyway, the Burn Notice season one DVD is out in the middle of June – I’ve been waiting for this ever since I saw the first episode

Can’t wait for season two…

P.S. This is my first post using Zemanta, which explains the new links to Wikipedia and the Related articles section.

It seems pretty handy so far – Zemanta automates the part of the blogging process where you look for pictures to go with your post, choose tags and linkify key words and phrases. Although I haven’t used any of its picture suggestions because it insists on putting them at the top of the post rather than next to the paragraph to which the picture refers.

Also its new suggestions make the old suggestions disappear, which could make it a pain to remove links after you’ve added them…