A little light refreshment about a wily agent cut loose
Jun 29, 2007 Burn Notice
Looking for something new and different on TV? It’s not Burn Notice.
Looking for some summertime fun? It is Burn Notice, premiering at 10 p.m. tomorrow on cable’s USA.
It combines the lively silliness from scores of shows that have gone before: The Rockford Files, MacGyver, Moonlighting, The Equalizer, Miami Vice, even Everybody Loves Raymond. Yeah, that’s only six, but it’s summer, and nobody should expect extensive research on a piece of fluff like this.
Do-it-yourselfers
can add all the shows that used a little behind-the-scenes narration,
and on-screen captions to identify new characters, and ongoing
mysteries, and spry escapades where lots of people get hurt but nobody
dies, and a sharp pro aiding the downtrodden, and cuts to girls in
bikinis, and car chases, and colorful low- and high-life personalities
who popped up all the time.
Tomorrow, there’s Sugar, the drug
dealer, and Walter, the art dealer, and Vince, the not-so-competent
security guy. But after all, who can be competent against the
special-ops, street-savvy dynamo who is Michael Western?
‘Burn Notice’ leaves spy out in cold
Jun 29, 2007 Burn Notice, Reviews
To the obsessive-compulsive detective of “Monk” and the frankly fake
psychic of “Psych,” the USA Network is about to add the irreverent spy
of “Burn Notice.”
Too bad they couldn’t come up with a catchy one-syllable title -
“Mole”? - because this new series and its brash, breezy hero slide
smoothly into the crime-and-comedy genre the cable channel does so well.
A “burn notice,” we learn from the voiceover narration of agent
Michael Westen (Jeffrey Donovan, “Touching Evil”), is what a spy gets
instead of a pink slip.
Michael gets burned at an inconvenient time, to say the least.
Watch with Kristen Chat
Jun 29, 2007 Burn Notice
Victoria in Chicago: The previews for Burn Notice on USA look pretty good, plus Jeffrey Donovan is never bad to look at. Have you heard anything about this show? Worth watching?
It’s a fun show, and oddly believable for being about a freelance spy trapped in Miami with his neurotic mother. The main character, Michael Westen, reminds me of MacGyver and/or Michael Scofield. I talked to the creator, Matt Nix, this morning, and he told me they’re working on keeping the action as realistic as possible: “I’ve always been interested in the nitty-gritty of espionage. A really good friend of my dad’s when I was little…had been in the CIA. He would tell me things. So, I knew when I was five, like, a CIA agent never parks in the same parking space twice. Plus, our consulting producer worked in private intelligence for years, and my father-in-law was a captain in the Navy SEALs, so we download a lot of stuff from them.”
Source: E!
Review: In “Burn Notice,” the spy’s the limit
Jun 29, 2007 Burn Notice, Reviews
Time flies by when you’re having fun watching the extended premiere of USA’s breezy new spy romp, “Burn Notice.”
Yet this is one of those pilot episodes that makes you wonder whether they can sustain the zippy pace, not to mention the production values, week after week. Tonight’s 70-minute thrill-o-rama has fight scenes, car chases, gunplay and an unending rogue’s gallery of witty good and bad guys (mostly bad), helpfully ID’d on screen with handles like Ex-Spy, Money Launderer, The Rich Guy, The Buddy and even The Handler.
Expect USA’s Burn Notice to go down in flames
Jun 29, 2007 Burn Notice, Reviews
South Florida is unbeatable as a setting for a TV series. But first you need a show. Miami Vice understood this. Few, if any, of the copycats do. Burn Notice is the latest example. The area is as alluring as ever but everything else about the USA series, save maybe the cavalcade of fleshy scene-setters, is as inviting as peeling sunburn. USA, whose slogan is “characters wanted,” could have used a few more interesting ones in place of the cardboard figures who populate the light drama. Jeffrey Donovan, who stars as former American spy Michael Westen, may be cute (although not as cute as he tries to be), but he lacks the charisma to be more than just another pretty face.
