In Shameful, Disgraceful, Joyous Praise of…
Burn Notice.
Guys. Let’s not kid ourselves. As TV goes, it’s ain’t Shakespeare.
There’s so much not to like.
Borderline-offensive lingering shots on scantily-clad, narratively irrelevant women, buttocks swaying beneath the Miami sun; story lines that make you want to bang your head against a wall, the occasional piece of truly clunky, dire exposition, questionable ethics, hilarious implausibilities… oh my. There is so, so much to be unimpressed by.
And yet…
… to my horror…
… I discover that I love it.
Perhaps the mantra that I should recite as I devour episode after episode should be, ‘it’s not you, it’s me’. I am not loving it because of what it is, but because of who I am, and who I am is someone who enjoys every-now-and-then, a bit of jubilant, C4-exploding, gun-toting, spy-chasing, car-crashing, lovingly-cheerful spy-crime-thriller-fluff. Sometimes the programme attempts to be ‘dark’, but when you’ve got a show that’s shot entirely in Miami and the median brightness of every frame is hot enough to sear through a standard British TV screen, even the darkest of darks looks like it’s going to get a suntan. A lot of the time it aims to be funny, and it is, in a sofa-curling ‘oh god I can’t believe you just said that’ kinda way. For a huge amount of time, it’s simply pretty. Pretty people hitting things; pretty people lying, cheating, conning their way through various plot problems for the sake of the Greater Good, pretty people shooting at other pretty people, pretty people being betrayed and betraying in their parts.
The setup is fairly simple. Ex-spy betrayed by Mysterious Powers is forced to take up residence in his home town of Miami, where, while following The Big Story Arc of recovering his job/life/love/vengeance etc., there’s also the weekly arc of Solving Today’s Problem. Enter the thing that probably most redeems the show: the characters. Pissed-off Ex-Spy; Drunken Ex-Marine, Violent Ex-Terrorist, and to make all things better, Ex-Spy’s Chain-Smoking-Mum, who more-or-less steals the show.
“I know!” quoth one or more of these characters. “To solve this week’s problem what we need to do is disguise you as an endangered red panda vendor, put you in the guise of an FBI agent who’s partner died of leprosy, and send you to rob the Federal Reserve. That way we’ll save the kid who’s Dad stole the file from the Mum who works in the building where your best friend’s uncle lives.”
“That’s a terrible idea; let’s do it!” replies partners-in-crime. Then: “Oh no!” they exclaim, about twenty minutes into the episode. “Turns out, the red panda is an escaped fugitive, the FBI agent had scrofula not leprosy, the Federal Reserve is closed on bank holidays and the Mum’s building is in fact an igloo that’s been wired to blow. What the hell are we gonna do now?”
“I’ve got an idea,” replies Ex-Spy. “But it’s gonna be incredibly dangerous…”
Enter the DIY element of Burn Notice. The Ex-Spy narrates a great deal of the action, in the following manner:
“When things go wrong with a plan, and you’re stuck in an igloo that’s been wired to explode with an angry red panda and a couple of paracetamol, there’s only one thing left to do. Mix panda spit and half a paracetamol together in a plastic bag, strip some cables with your teeth, plug in the battery from your car remote, and you’ve got a small working nuclear reactor.”
“Hurrah!” we, the viewing audience, cheer from our chairs. “Bring on your mysterious assassins with dubious European accents that might be French, could be Danish, we don’t really care. Roll out the sinister drug dealers who you’re gonna have to make a questionable deal with, and the femme fatale who simpered right until the moment where she shot the other guy for stealing the computery thing from the dead dude! Bring on your sorta-krav-maga-ish fighting style, and, as fiery things blow up and bits of shrapnel fall from the skies above Miami beaches, bring on your moments of unresolved romantic tension followed by a knife fight, whoopeee!”
When I was judging the Kitschies last year, we were asked to reward books that were progressive, intelligent and entertaining. As a panel, we were very worried about what ‘progressive’ even meant, and even now I’m not sure we could agree. However, watching Burn Notice I am happy to say that it is about as progressive as a cardboard box, meaningful as a magpie, but somehow so, so, so entertaining.
