Friday, August 24, 2007

Burn Notice - Not Great Summer TV

What to watch during the summer - the big prime-time shows finish production and re-runs abound.

Increasingly, however, networks are using the summer to test new shows, and some excellent TV has appeared (Weeds, and The Shield are two that spring to mind).

Burn Notice was one of this years bbq-and-beer offerings, served up by Fox. The series stars Jeffery Donovan,Gabrielle Anwar (from this year's The Tudors), and Bruce Campbell (famous for his Evil Dead movies), all as ex-agents/terrorists (what a fine line that is) in Miami. Donovan's character, Michael Westen, was dumped there after having a burn notice tacked on his file at the worst possible moment; he can't leave Miami, and his bank accounts are frozen.

The goal: find out why he was blacklisted. But the writers have figured that there isn't enough meat in this story line to carry the show, so they fall back on that old, tired, boring, tedious, device of having the show's "hero" doing good deeds along the way a la the A-Team.

Donovan is pretty good, and he almost makes up for all the crappy plots, but not quite. This show will be off our PVR recording list once the fall premiers start.


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