4 out of 5

Created by: Matt Nix

I had assumptions about a USA network series that weren’t necessarily dispelled by the promos for Burn Notice, or the types who would recommend it to me. And while I wouldn’t say those assumptions were disproven when I would finally consume the series 10+ years after its debut, the vastly changed TV landscape during that time has firstly given me huge appreciation for reliable popcorn TV like Burn, but also – given some other timely TV consumption – helped underline an unoriginal, but key realization: that the show is arguably an updated (…improved?) MacGyver.

BN’s premise is simple; the magic by which the writers turn it into an adventure-of-the-week is quite brilliantly sustained, however: Jeffrey Donovan plays CIA spy Michael Westen, who discovers, in our first episode, that he’s a spy no more, “burned” by his taskmasters and left without an agency or its resources. He sets his sights on trying to find out why he was burned – and specifically by whom – operating out of Miami, which just so happens to be where an ex-FBI buddy is (Sam Axe – played by Bruce Campbell), an ex-girlfriend and thief is (Fiona Glenanne – Gabrielle Anwar), and his on-acrimonious-terms mother is (Sharon Gless). And in order to fund his quest, Michael undertakes episode-by-episode jobs where his skills (assisted by Sam and Fiona) are useful – rescuing folk, tracking down missing things, etc. – often using extra-legal methods and a very MacGyver-y makeshift machinations approach. When the task-a-day concept runs thin, Michael’s quest – the narrative of finding his burner always touched on along the way, and often woven into the weekly plot in some fashion – finds him with different taskmasters or info-brokers, approximately per season. This provides for an astoundingly impressive wealth of fun episodic conceits, that – thanks to an all-around great cast, including the addition of Coby Bell in season 4; and surely thanks to smart and effective production; and absolutely thanks to strong – that for the majority of seven seasons, the show is never unwatchable, always entertaining, and only rarely a bit long in the tooth.

There’s some plus/minus in its strengths: a great strength is in how internally consistent the over-arching narrative of “why was Michael burned?” is; but at the same time, because we’re never freed from that, you start to see the strings pulling that long-running thread along a bit too clearly, knowing we’re chasing our tail on a lot of things, and so the show probably ultimately ended at a good point… even if I would’ve kept watching it. Secondly, the steady rate at which the writers and actors grow the relationships between the leads feels right, earning trust very slowly and building to more emotional expressions, but that relative “realism” can be a bit of a churn when arcs require that trust to logically be backburnered, i.e. we see some behaviors repeated on a loop.

But I’d absolutely take the negatives from these due to how much more impactful the positives are.

And all the other, isolated stuff is just… fun. BN’s writers apparently prized themselves on a bit more accuracy than MacGyver, so the various spy ops stuff we see has a taint of usefulness to it, and Donovan’s voiceovered delivery is so confident that it sells it regardless. Alongside this, though, is the very MacGyver seat-of-the-pantsness which always adds to the thrills: every plan is pretty sharp (or at least “right” for the scenario) but inevitably goes awry, and it’s only through teamwork or some luck blended with the team’s talents that get them through. It’s a great formula.

Which is the takeaway: Burn Notice is a formulaic show. It’s a USA series that has a smirking Bruce Campbell and takes place in Miami to justify lots of shots of bikinis. You can mostly call out the structure of any given episode. …And then it uses all of that reliable formulaicness to play around and stretch out, establishing itself as one of the smartest and most memorable examples of -of-the-week series to date, and likely for a long time to come.