Almost 10 years on and I have a confession, my favourite spy in Miami is still Michael Weston.
Times have changed a little since the late 2000’s. You can now choose from thousands of things to watch at the press of a button, with new releases springing up weekly to compete for your attention. This wasn’t always the case though, and back when Burn Notice was on the free-to-air lineup, I was all in. I blame my love back then on youth – something about mid-budget action scenes, car chases and cheesy one-liners just struck a chord in high school. So why do I find myself dipping into it now, a full decade later? Is it that same nostalgic hook that Hollywood has come to rely on for the past few years? Probably. But there’s something else to it, something familiar in its design, structure and vibe that makes it so easy to slip back into. For the lack of a better term, there’s something I find comfortable about the action-heavy, spy drama that is Burn Notice.
For those unfamiliar with Michael Weston (Jason Donovan), he used to be a spy. After being ‘burned’ (fired) from the CIA, he’s dumped back in his hometown of Miami to pick up the pieces. Regrouping with ex-girlfriend and gun-runner Fiona (Gabrielle Anwar), ex-Navy Seal Sam (Bruce Campbell) and former spy Jesse (Coby Bell), Michael spends 7 seasons and 111 episodes getting to the bottom of who burnt him and why. This is the main plot thread, but it is rarely the focus. Each episode devotes a small amount of time to pushing the wider story forward, but the majority of the runtime is devoted to an involved, if somewhat predictable, side hustle of local hero work. Someone from the core group comes across some trouble, which leads Michael and the gang to assume identities, stage gunfights, run cars off the road and essentially blow holes across the better half of Florida.
Therein lies the magic formula: a problem arises and the heroes arrive with a solution. A spanner is thrown into the works, and the heroes must make a last-minute comeback to save the day. It’s this grade-school story structure that served as the backbone of classics such as Magnum P.I. and The A-Team, and it continues to work here. Granted it doesn’t always make sense, some of the dialogue isn’t great and it jumps the shark on more than one occasion, but the episodes are consistent, the characters are endearing and it knows exactly what it is. You could watch an episode from the second season followed by another from the fifth, and you’d still be getting a solid hour of action without all the strings that would regularly be attached to episodes between.
I think this is the main reason I slip into shows like Burn Notice now and then. The biggest programs at the moment are cinematic, evolving stories that are so enormous that they become episodic by necessity, rather than by design. Something like Stranger Things is engrossing, intricate, surprising and emotional all at once, and it’s inarguably fantastic. However it’s also something that you need to completely invest in to enjoy at its fullest. Missing a reference or scene in an early episode can deteriorate your understanding of events later, and you constantly need to keep on top of a range of plotlines, characters and conflicts during each season for everything to piece together.
When all of this is a bit much for a mid-week watch after work, you can find me deep in a rerun of Burn Notice. It could be something different for you – Friends, Grey’s Anatomy, The Blacklist, Supernatural, even Law and Order – anything that gives you that engaging hour or so without demanding more. ‘Comfort TV’ still doesn’t quite have a nice ring to it for me, but I think we all have a show or two we turn to when something simple and familiar is on the docket. For me, this zen state involves Miami spies driving nice cars and blowing things up – and I wouldn’t have it any other way.
Burn Notice stars Jeffrey Donovan, Gabrielle Anwar, Bruce Campbell, Sharon Gless and Coby Bell. Watch it now on Disney +.
