When Last We Left Our (Anti-) Hero …
I firmly believe that the best TV on TV right now is on cable. TNT, USA, tbs, FX, AMC, (my goodness all those acronyms!), if you compare their offerings to NBC, CBS, ABC, Fox and CW, well, let’s just say it’s apples and oranges.
On Thursday, one of the best shows on any channel returns for its third season. Burn Notice is a spy show, a crime drama, a comedy, an ensemble, and a travel ad for Miami. It’s gorgeously shot, wittily written, and terrifically acted.
It’s about Michael Westen, a professional government spy who gets “burned” (that means fired in the spy world, but worse than just getting a pink slip). He heads home to Miami to regroup and try and solve the mystery of who had him wrongly “burned.” Miami is home to his mom, his best friend Sam and his former girlfriend Fiona. They all join forces to try and help Michael get his old job back.
The cast is magnificent. Jeffrey Donovan plays Westen with a cool detachment that occasionally cracks to show a heart. Donovan is a lean, gorgeous fighting machine with just the right amount of irony thrown into the delivery of every line. He gets the joke.
His BFF Sam is played by cult icon Bruce Campbell, a beefy washed-out military intelligence contact. Sam is usually running some sort of scam on the side that often draws Michael in. He can be the source of great comedy, or the source of great emotion on the show.
Speaking of lean, the muscle known as Gabrielle Anwar plays Michael’s ex-girlfriend Fiona. She’s also an ex-IRA operative who really likes to blow things up and shoot things with giant guns. In last season’s finale, when she shot Michael’s nemesis Carla, her one-word line: “Finally,” pretty much summed it all up.
Rounding out the group is Michael’s chain-smoking, emotionally crippling, codependent enabler mother, played by Sharon Gless. If you think you’ve got mommy issues, get a load of this relationship.
Each week, the plot gives Michael et al a “client,” some hard luck man or woman who needs help outside the law to have some wrong righted. But behind each of those stand-alone stories was the continuing question of who burned Michael and why. The show did a really good job of balancing both. The mythology remained interesting and the front-burner stories always involved some terrific sting and lots of fun gadgets and equipment.
During the second season, the mythology got a little convoluted, and when last we left Michael, he was jumping out of a helicopter out over the ocean off the coast of Miami. John Mahoney was the Head Spy Guy, who told Michael that the group who burned him had actually been protecting him, and if he left, there’d be no more safety net.
Michael being Michael, he left. Jumped right out of the copter, and began swimming for the (far off) shore. Hmmm. I still don’t quite get who burned him or why, but I don’t really care. This show is so fun to watch that it sort of doesn’t matter.
In Thursday’s return (9 p.m., USA), “Michael emerges from the water free from interference by the organization that burned him. But he’s no longer under their protection, and is being investigated by the police. He gets out of prison with help from an old friend who has a job for him: extraditing a thug who’s displacing landowners in a Latin American country.”
If you haven’t gotten “Burn”ed already, I highly recommend you check it out
Source: The Day
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