On the box

An Ode to Burn Notice

Occasionally, there’ll be a show on television that no one else but you can appreciate.

For some people, it’s soap operas. Recently, reality television has become the go-to guilty pleasure; with who-sassed-whom becoming idle water cooler chatter around the Monday morning workplace. Can you believe what that couple from MKR did to their Chicken Scaloppini last week? Can you believe how zany Mark and Duncan’s third toilet was on the Block? Did you see that incredibly talented musician on Australia’s Got Talent!? (the last one was most likely never said by anyone) and so on and so forth.

I digress. For me, personally, I take great pleasure in watching a show about to begin production on its seventh season of mind-numbing dialogue, explosions, fast cars and even faster women.

Burn Notice is like watching a weekly James Bond movie that’s directed by Michael Bay’s younger and less talented little brother. The plot centres on exiled spy Michael Westen (played by former B-Grade actor Jeremy Donovan) who has been unceremoniously dumped by his agency in the colourful city of Miami. Michael will stop at nothing to find the people who have “set him up” and he is supported by his new unlikely team of friends. The core plot is usually set aside in favour of delightful bits of filler, as Michael and his team are usually out in the Miami community, assisting folks in need while using their special “spy skills”.

It’s starting to sound familiar and to be honest; there are some similarities with other shows that have carried a similar format. The Pretender, Quantum Leap and more famously The A-Team have all carried stories of down-on-their-luck individuals fighting the good fight, Robin Hood style. This is where the similarities end however, as espionage is the central theme of the program.

The appeal of Burn Notice is the simplicity. Miami has a warm climate. Every episode has a beach littered with scantily clad girls, there are plenty of fast cars and there are more guns than any recent Die Hard film.  The one-liners are often out in force. Burn Notice doesn’t pretend to be anything that it’s not, and that’s what makes it such an unashamedly fun show to watch.

The supporting cast also help make this show convincing; Michael’s on-off girlfriend Fiona (Gabrielle Anwar) is a pyromaniac femme fatale who spends most of the first six seasons of the show rigging cars to explode while wearing a bikini.

If you want good, clean, harmless, mindless, trashy fun; the kind that Hollywood spends millions of dollars to invest in (usually with Jason Statham involved in some way), then Burn Notice is definitely for you.

New and old Episodes of Burn Notice can be seen on Ten’s digital channel, One, almost as frequently as episodes of Cops.