Recent Articles
The Spy Who Loved His Mother, Barely
Jun 29, 2007 Burn Notice Leave a comment
The lighter side of espionage has pretty much fallen by the wayside. Something about 9/11, secret C.I.A. prisons and the poisoning of former K.G.B. agents in Europe has cast a pall on spy spoofs.
And that’s why the casual irreverence of “Burn Notice” is a little
unsettling; the USA Network’s new series is a jaunty, tongue-in-cheek
drama about an American spy who gets kicked out into the cold.
In tonight’s premiere a wisecracking agent for hire named Michael
Westen (Jeffrey Donovan) recounts his covert intelligence work in a
cool, sarcastic voice-over, like that of a pulp-fiction private eye.
“Know what it’s like being a spy?” he asks. “It’s like sitting in your
dentist’s reception area 24 hours a day. You read magazines, sip coffee
and every so often someone tries to kill you.” Michael is in the middle
of a secret operation in Nigeria, bribing thuggish warlords to lay off
an oil field, when his employers inform him that he has a “burn notice”
in his file and is blacklisted.
‘Burn Notice’ amply fills the fun void on TV this summer
Jun 29, 2007 Burn Notice Leave a comment
Somewhere along the line, summer television forgot the true meaning of fun.
A short, simplistic, even childish word, but important. There’s a fun deficit going on in TV on these sunny days.
Plenty of people would vehemently disagree. Why, we’re a stone’s
throw away from fun on any given night. “America’s Got Talent” or “The
Next Best Thing” or any reality competition that a coma patient with
eyes half open can keep up with — if that’s not fun, what is it?
Wallpaper masquerading as primetime programming. Background noise.
COME SPY WITH ME
Jun 29, 2007 Burn Notice, Reviews Leave a comment
NOW that the Cold War is over and hot spots are popping up all over the world, a spy could get burned if he’s not on his game every minute. That’s the premise behind “Burn Notice,” the surprisingly fun new series on USA that stars Jeffrey Donovan as Michael Westen, blacklisted spy extraordinaire.The show opens with a voiceover from Westen narrating the action as he nearly loses his life in Nigeria when he discovers that he’s no longer recognized by his agency. Amnesia a la Jason Bourne? Nah - burn notice a la the CIA.
A little light refreshment about a wily agent cut loose
Jun 29, 2007 Burn Notice Leave a comment
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 Leave a comment
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.
