‘Burn Notice’: Firearms and Foreplay

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Matthew Weiner, the creator of AMC’s “Mad Men,” may have been last summer’s most critically acclaimed television auteur, but it was another Matthew, 36-year-old Matt Nix, who came up with the summer’s biggest and most neatly conceived new cable show. If nothing else, his USA series, “Burn Notice,” lit a fuse to “Mad Men” in terms of viewership: 2.9 million Americans tuned in to it weekly, compared with the 900,000 who made it over to AMC to catch up with “Mad Men” and its painstaking re-creation of the New York ad agency world of 1960.

Mr. Nix, it turns out, is the great-grandson of Harry Chandlee, one of the screenwriters behind Howard Hawks’s 1941 classic “Sergeant York,” in which Gary Cooper played a reluctant war hero who single-handedly takes out an entire company despite being a pacifist at heart. “America’s greatest modern hero!” reads the tagline for the film at imdb.com. “… Thrilling and inspiring story of the kind of men America is made of!”

Hmm. Remind you of anything? Returning to the small screen this Thursday for a second season, “Burn Notice” certainly celebrates a very American “modern hero.” Here, it’s Michael Westen, the compulsively helpful CIA spy turned freelance operative played by Jeffrey Donovan with a style that’s as crisp as his uber-cool suits. Like most shows on USA (“Monk,” “Psych”), this one can border on the cartoonish and is rarely if ever believable, but its thematic core is rock-solid.

Having been given a pink slip, or “burn notice,” by the CIA for reasons he cannot fathom, Westen is consumed with trying to find out what exactly the CIA has against him and what he could possibly have done to incur the agency’s displeasure. He’s on his own, life is a seemingly insoluble puzzle, and he’s got to put the pieces together. Minus the guns, the designer clothing, the car chases, and so forth, that’s more or less how things are for the rest of us — hence the power of the show.

In the first season, Westen, stranded in Miami as the victim of an all-encompassing identity theft, freelanced as a quasi-private detective. Small cases were sent his way by his not-very-trustworthy pal and fellow ex-spy, Sam (Bruce Campbell), and all of them turned out, predictably, to be a lot more complicated than they first appeared. They certainly never failed to involve colorful villains and huge explosions. They also showcased the special-ops skills of Westen’s maniacally gung-ho ex-IRA girlfriend, Fiona (Gabrielle Anwar), a lissome lady never happier than with a gun in her hand and the safety off.

Rounding out the small cast was Sharon Gless as Westen’s needy, chain-smoking mother, Madeline, who lives in Miami and, prior to his burn notice, was the main reason Westen generally preferred to hang out in places like Nigeria. But Westen’s a good boy. His mother may be a self-centered, hypochondriacal disaster zone, but when she needs him (which she does frequently, though rarely for a good reason), he’s there. Beneath the glitz, “Burn Notice” is a show with very old-fashioned values, namely country, family, self-reliance, and helping those in need.

Last season’s finale concluded with Westen driving his car up a ramp into the cargo hold of a giant truck with no idea of what was about to happen apart from the small chance he might finally discover why the agency gave him the boot. Thursday night’s premiere begins with the moment he’s let out — he’s been in there about two days — and he’s none the wiser for his trouble. All he knows is that a woman who calls herself “Carla” (Tricia Helfer, Cylon Number Six of “Battlestar Galactica”), at this point no more than a flirtatious voice on the end of a cell phone, is his new boss, and just might eventually clear up the mystery that obsesses him, if he plays along. In the meantime, he has to do her dirty work. In other words, it’s more or less back to business as usual, but with the stakes bigger than before and, with Ms. Helfer on board, a welcome addition to the cast.

Westen’s voice-over narration remains one of the show’s major selling points; he provides us with his views on air bags in cars (a nuisance during twisty, stop-start evasive maneuvers), how to pass yourself off as someone you’re not, how to get someone to divulge how his security system works (you criticize it, and in reaction he starts defending it, and thus explains it), how to drill through a floor without electrocuting yourself, etc.

Westen’s first job for Carla is to steal a computer database from a private military company (that is, mercenaries). This, somewhat unfortunately, involves Westen pretending to be an English client with an unconvincing Cockney accent, though it seems to pass muster in Miami. Still, it’s one of the few times in the series when Mr. Donovan’s limitations as an actor have been exposed. On the other hand, it does lead to a particularly enjoyable sequence in which Westen is forced to pretend that Fiona and Sam, who are doing surveillance for him and have been spotted by the mercenaries, are complete strangers whom he’s ready to start shooting. He knows that if Fiona and Sam see him fire a gun at them, they’ll realize he’s using them to make his cover story more convincing and act accordingly.

“It takes a good marksman to shoot you at 50 feet from a moving car,” he informs us. “But it takes a great marksman to miss, while making it look as if they’re trying to hit you — or markswoman, as the case may be.”

The markswoman would be Fiona, who neatly shoots a bullet that lands between Westen’s feet. He responds with a shot of his own that no doubt misses her lovely Irish brow by about 3 inches. It’s gunplay as foreplay, and they’re both enjoying it enormously. As for the mercenaries, they’re finally convinced that Westen is who he says he is. Job done. Time for Westen to go over and fix Mom’s coffeemaker.

bbernhard@nysun.com


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