Burn Notice back up and running
07/10/08 07:27 AM
By ED BARK
Back for a second season Thursday, Burn Notice pretty much fits the USA network's no-substitutes menu for commercial success.
This is drama with a bounce in its step, following the formulas of Monk, Psych and The Starter Wife, which now is being turned into a series.
USA, owned by NBC Universal, doesn't buy into FX's brand of dark, explosive storytelling driven by battered, tattered lead characters. Burn Notice has explosions, all right. But it's all property damage.
Not that this hasn't made USA increasingly popular of late. Burn Notice, built around a blacklisted spy, ranked as the cable world's No. 1-rated new scripted series last season. It did especially well where it counts -- with advertiser-favored 18-to-49-year-old and 25-to-54-year-old viewers.
So what's not to like? More to the point, there's really nothing to love. Burn Notice (9 p.m. central on Thursdays) is passably entertaining in its heavily narrated tales of spy vs. spies. Its centerpiece, the disenfranchised Michael Weston (Jeffrey Donovan), jauntily goes about the business of cleaning up messes while also trying to deduce who burned him. Maxwell Smart he's not.
Weston's Miami Beach cohorts are ex-IRA operative/ex-girlfriend Fiona Glenanne (Gabrielle Anwar) and worse-for-wear Sam Axe (Bruce Campbell), who still dabbles in military intelligence.
They aid him in various convoluted capers while Weston's chain-smoking mother Madeline (Sharon Gless) serves as a constant irritant. Gless, the former Cagney & Lacey star, hams it up to the point where you'd like to throw momma from the train. Maybe that's supposed to be the point, but too much scenery-chewing can knock a show off track.
The second season premiere episode, subtitled "Old Friends," finds Weston coming to the aid of a schlepper named Jimmy. Some bad guys took his wife and kid for reasons that are hardly made crystal clear. But Weston can save the day by breaking into a heavily fortified office and retrieving some stolen data. First though, he impersonates a ruthless Australian before the well-appointed Fiona easily dupes a typically bald and bowled-over deskman/nebbish in order to get the keys to the kingdom.
"It's so stiff," she tells him, referring to a pen stuck in a notebook holder.
"I'll pull it out," says he. As double entendres go, that's mighty limp.
Meanwhile, Weston's ongoing voice-overs serve as a guidebook for what spies do, don't, won't and can't. There's way too much narration going around these days. It's a lazy device that shirks the more challenging task of writing crisp dialogue.
New this season to Burn Notice is a "handler" named Carla (Tricia Helfer from Battlestar Galactica). She's only heard over the phone in Thursday's re-opener, directing our hero to play ball and risk all. In turn he yearns to learn exactly who she is.
USA will air nine new episodes of Burn Notice on Thursdays before taking a break and returning with seven more in January. It beats watching most of the unscripted slop dominating broadcast networks' schedules this summer. Still, that's hardly a ringing endorsement of a series that in reality has way too little heat.
Grade: C
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