‘Burn Notice’ . . . the cure for the summertime TV blues
Jul 9, 2008 Burn Notice, Reviews
Thank goodness we have each other.
Last week we all collectively lamented how reality TV dominates the television schedule during the summer. I don’t know about you but I kind of found it therapeutic to know so many TV viewers out there shared my reality TV pain.
As with any genre, there’s good reality TV (I can’t wait for Project Runway to return next week), bad reality TV (Big Brother is back for a 10th season Sunday. Repeat after me - I promise not to get sucked in. I promise not to get sucked in. We need to support each other on this one.) and ugly reality TV (honestly do you understand that people actually loan out their own children for the series The Baby Borrowers. It defies comprehension.) And ugly reality TV seems to run rampant during the dog days of summer. It’s a pretty awful TV landscape out there.
Thankfully, this week we have three new scripted shows to celebrate (okay one is only available online but we’ll take what we can get this month, don’t you think).
A look at the -hooray!- non-reality TV coming your way:
Burn Notice (second season premiere Thursday at 10 p.m. on USA): The big news, as I’m sure you’ve heard, is that Tricia Helfer (Battlestar Galactica) is joining the cast as Carla, the mysterious woman who might know why Michael (Jeffrey Donovan) has been burned. Let’s hope Michael doesn’t find that out any time soon because Burn Notice remains the perfect escapist series. Even if you don’t keep up with the ongoing mystery of Michael being blacklisted as a spy, each episode is so much fun it won’t really matter if you don’t know exactly what’s going on. Just as Mad Men seems tailor made to showcase Jon Hamm or The Closer lets Krya Sedgwick shine, Burn Notice relishes Donovan’s delightful performance – there’s no doubt that this is the role of his career. Michael is the perfect fusion of spot-on acting and writing. And it doesn’t hurt that Donovan is surrounded by a great cast including Sharon Gless as his mom and Bruce Campbell as his best friend Sam. Gless is particularly wonderful (she is TV’s go to mom) and the relationship between Michael and his mom really begins to evolve in the first two episodes I’ve seen of the second season. And although you won’t see much of her in the first few episodes, Helfer does mysterious, ruthless woman well. Burn Notice is the cure for the summertime TV blues. Four stars.
Courtesy of Zap2it.com
Leave a Reply