Michael relies on the help of two of his most colorful friends – Fiona Glenanne (Gabrielle Anwar), the ex-IRA assassin whose fondness for Michael matches her love for C-4; and Sam Axe (Bruce Campbell), a retired FBI agent who prefers socializing with beach bunnies to shooting it out with drug dealers. His mother provides him with equal measures of support and stress, offering him a place to crash but also questioning him about his shady dealings. And Michael leverages favors from law enforcement, the criminal underworld or any of his “clients” to learn more about the show’s overarching mystery: who burned him and why.
Burn Notice blazes miles ahead of its competitors (in action/drama and thriller/comedy, two ancient genres) due to its remarkable cleverness. Michael rarely uses a gun in the course of an episode, preferring instead to talk past, trick or disarm his opponents. Without his agency resources, he has to improvise complex technical devices from common household equipment. He plays enemies off against each other, runs mind games within mind games, and does it all with a grin. Not only that, but a constant voice-over narrates the details of Michael’s job – the world from a spy’s perspective.
Here’s Michael in the pilot episode, making a bug out of two cell phones:
To build a listening device, you need a crappy phone with a mike that picks up everything. But you want the battery power and circuits of a better phone. It’s a trick you learn when the purchasing office won’t spring for a bug.
And here’s a short list of clever things Michael did in the most recent episode, “End Run”:
- Constructed a cell phone eavesdropping device out of a coat hanger antenna, a Pringles can, some pencils and a USB cable.
- Smashed into a secured office, then talked his way out of getting arrested.
- Tricked a paranoid gun nut out of his house without having to draw a weapon himself.
- Isolated and overpowered a two-man security team – again, without firing a weapon of his own.
- Deduced a bad guy’s weak point – his family – from a few context clues and the name of an overseas bank.
That’s more tradecraft, gadgetry and clever fisticuffs than you’d see in an entire season of 24.
So we’ve identified Burn Notice as one of the smartest and most fun series on television today. But why is it so good?
In 1950, a man named David Cornwell took up a post with British Intelligence in Austria. He was an intelligence officer in the most real sense – not the glamor of James Bond or the action of Jason Bourne, but the quiet and meticulous tradecraft of the real professional. Cornwell specialized in interrogations, debriefing defectors from over the Iron Curtain, and the occasional bit of breaking and entering.
In the 60s, after bouncing from Austria to Britain and ending up in West Germany, Cornwell turned his eye to writing. He started with a couple of traditional mystery novels – Call for the Dead and A Murder of Quality – which received no great attention. However, as Ian Fleming’s James Bond novels grew in popularity, Cornwell began writing spy novels of his own. Unlike Fleming’s breezy transcontinental jaunts, Cornwell’s novels depicted a spy world full of paranoia, office politics and dark cynicism.
Since he was still a member of the Foreign Office, Cornwell published these novels under a pseudonym: John le Carré.
le Carré has since gone on to become an international bestseller for five decades straight, a defining pillar of the spy fiction genre. The world of his spy novels – the Cambridge “Circus,” the decaying cities along the Iron Curtain – breeds mistrust. The heroes and the villains employ the same methods: turning lovers against each other, sacrificing innocents to lure in key players, and then setting those players up to betray bigger players in turn. And the inhabitants of this world know it.
I bring this up because, for the sunniness of the setting and the winking fun of the tone, Burn Notice tells a remarkably cynical story about the global intelligence community. Michael Westen gets burned, losing his career and a dozen years of employment history, as an opening move in a game too complex for him to see. He relies on his friends to feed false information about him to others, like using Sam in S1 as a double agent against the FBI. He pits bad guys against each other, getting drug dealers and smugglers to murder each other rather than turning them over to the cops. For all the warmth of Miami, Michael lives in a pretty cold world.
And I think this is a deliberate le Carré parallel.
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The Spy Who Came In From The Cold
1963 novel, famously adapted into a Richard Burton film, about Alec Leamas, an intelligence officer whose East Berlin network gets smashed in a single cataclysmic evening. Leamas returns to London in disgrace, where his commanding officer – “Control” – asks him to go back “into the cold” one last time. Leamas continues his slide into alcoholism and poverty, allowing himself to get picked up by an East German recruiter and brought in for interrogation. In so doing, Leamas hopes to implicate the spymaster who killed his agents, Hans Mundt, as a double agent, thus getting revenge.
The parallels between The Spy Who Came In From The Cold and Burn Notice:
- An agent who gets “burned” by his handlers because he’s more useful as a discredited pawn than as a member of the agency.
- Both Leamas and Michael use sophisticated means to not only gather information, but plant disinformation in the minds of their targets. In the Season 3 episode “Questions and Answers,” Michael undergoes a reverse interrogation – letting himself get captured and questioned by the enemy so as to draw out what the enemy knows. This isn’t the first time he’s pulled a stunt like that (S2, Ep 4 – “Comrades” plays out similarly). This is essentially what Leamas does, too – letting Mundt’s subordinate Fiedler interrogate him and, gradually, uncover the “truth.”
- A generally cynical view of the good-guys/bad-guys mentality in espionage. In completing his Job Of The Week, Michael rarely turns his targets over to the cops or the FBI. He usually tricks them into offing each other. And when pursuing the secrets of his own past, Michael has no problem calling on enemies of the state – like when he gets the attention of an NSA goon by having the Libyan Embassy send him a fruit basket (S1, Ep 9). Leamas, once captured by the KGB, is happy to advance Fiedler’s career by giving him the ammunition he needs to tarnish Mundt.
Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy
1974 novel, less famously adapted into a BBC miniseries starring Alec Guinness, about retired British intelligence officer George Smiley. Smiley’s brought back into action by a report from a field agent, who has evidence that the botched operation which drove “Control” out of office was in fact sabotaged by a mole in British Intelligence. Smiley must conduct a secret investigation, without official agency backing, to uncover the mole.
The parallels between Tinker, Tailor and Burn Notice:
- Both Michael and Smiley must assemble a history of a conspiracy through piecemeal efforts. Smiley slowly interviews his way up the ladder until he has enough evidence to corner the mole. Michael assembles the backstory on his burn notice one piece at a time, often confronting handlers instrumental to his being burned. There’s no one clue that puts the whole picture into the frame.
- Both Michael and Smiley are operating without agency protection. Michael has to use Sam’s contacts and the aid of criminals (most often money launderer Barry) to get any intel. Smiley has to convince his former associate, Peter Guillam, to smuggle case files out of British Intelligence offices.
- Finally, Michael’s nemesis throughout Season 2 is a confident blonde spymaster, who coerces Michael into helping her though veiled threats against his family, named Carla. Smiley’s nemesis is the Russian intelligence officer who’s running the British mole, a man Smiley met and lost to years ago … codenamed Karla.
I’ll freely admit that this isn’t smoking-gun evidence for a connection between Burn Notice and the novels of le Carré. But it’s a clue – the tentative hint that might start a deeper investigation. And regardless of whether Matt Nix (creator of Burn Notice) intended the le Carré parallels or not, it’s clear that Burn Notice owes more to George Smiley and Alec Leamas than to James Bond or Jason Bourne.
