This Little Agent Ran All the Way Home
"You know what it's like being a spy? It's like sitting in your dentist's reception area 24 hours a day. You read magazines, drink coffee, and every so often someone tries to kill you."
So said Michael Westen (Jeffrey Donovan) in last Thursday's pilot episode of "Burn Notice," a sardonic, tongue-in-cheek take on what it's like to be a super cool CIA spook when the agency abruptly removes its welcome mat, freezes your bank account, has you shadowed, and generally behaves as if you were its worst enemy rather than a loyal foot soldier.
Naturally, they don't tell you why they don't like you anymore, and Michael, the spy who's received his burn notice ("We don't know you, we don't want to know you, but we will be watching you"), needs all his wits to begin to figure out exactly why he's been unceremoniously shoveled into the reject bin.
All in all, it makes for a model summer TV series, and if you missed the first episode, you should definitely check out the second on Thursday. "Burn Notice" starts out a bit like the latest James Bond movie, only retrofitted for the small screen with a hero who has smaller biceps but a better sense of humor. He also has a far sexier girlfriend, or ex-girlfriend, in Fiona (Gabrielle Anwar), a former Irish Republican Army operative for whom violence and sexual arousal go comically hand-in-hand.
The banter between them is nicely done. "Things could have worked out with us, Michael," Fiona told him silkily over dinner in a restaurant.
"You were robbing banks for the IRA," Michael replied.
"A spy is just a criminal with a government paycheck. You're the one with the two FBI agents watching him eat."
"Three."
"Bravo. Shall we shoot them?" "I've got enough problems."
"Oh well. More sake, then?"
The opening scene of the pilot took place in Warri, Nigeria, a town for which Michael displayed no particular fondness. ("Southern Nigeria isn't my favorite place in the world. It's unstable, it's corrupt , and the people there eat a lot of terrible smelling preserved fish.") Michael was there to bribe a Russian warlord into not blowing up oil fields when news of his burn notice came in. This meant he could no longer activate a promised wire transfer of $750,000 to the Russian's bank account —which meant in turn that the warlord's bodyguards were given free permission to take turns kicking him. Quick thinking, highly evolved combat skills, and a nifty way with a stolen motorcycle allowed Michael to escape the situation and make it to the airport and onto a flight going … somewhere. "If you're going to collapse on a plane, I recommend business class," he told us, slipping rapidly into unconsciousness in his roomy seat.
When he woke up, he was in Miami, with Fiona sitting beside the bed. She was the emergency contact in his phone book. "I heard you were dying," she told him with mock compassion, explaining why she'd flown down from New York to look after him. Miami is Michael's hometown, and as such, the place he's spent his life trying to stay away from. That's mainly because his mother, Madeleine, a needy, manipulative, chainsmoking hypochondriac played to comic perfection by Sharon Gless, lives there, and it's not long before she's tracked down his cell phone number and asked him to drive her to the doctor, never mind that he doesn't have a car. "Drop me in the middle of the Gobi Desert, bury me in a goddamn cave on the moon, and somehow she'll find a way to call me and ask for a favor," Michael moaned.
Lines like that one, coupled with Mr. Donovan's expert delivery of them, were a big part of what made the opening episode so much fun. As a spy story, "Burn Notice" never takes itself seriously, never asks you to believe in it, and yet you go along with it and its wise-cracking hero quite happily. This is probably because the premise is so good: The spy who's stranded in his hometown. Michael has no idea why the agency has decided to blacklist him, and because all his assets have been frozen, he also has no money. The only things that can't be taken away from him are his brains and experience. In the meantime he's stuck in South Beach, a "vacation wonderland" full of bimbos and drunks. He needs to find out why he's been blacklisted and he also needs to make some money.
Michael deals with the latter problem by hiring himself out as a private eye, and the first episode was mostly taken up with an investigation of a robbery at a real estate tycoon's estate. This allowed Michael to reveal his softer side after he figured out that the tycoon had staged the theft for an insurance payoff while trying to pin the crime on Javier (Savid Zayas), his loyal caretaker, a Latino widower with a cute little boy who's being bullied in school.
Though he can't stay in a relationship long enough to start a family, Michael has a soft spot for kids. His own upbringing was so miserable that the sight of an unhappy child — the ultimate "little guy" — renders him helpless. For using all his special ops training to clear Javier's name and teach his son how to fight his tormentors in school, Michael makes the measly sum of $4,500. Yet he discovers that the job is as satisfying as taking out a troublesome warlord in Afghanistan. I suppose it could be argued that by stranding Michael on his home turf and forcing him to deal with injustice at home rather than abroad, "Burn Notice" is making a tacit political point, but that would probably be reading too much into what is, a few gooey, sentimental moments aside, an enjoyably irreverent romp.
