Over the past five years, network television has been awash in mythology-heavy adventure series, soapy serio-comedies and one-week-at-a-time procedurals, so it's been left to basic cable to pick up the slack and air the kind of character-driven mysteries and episodic dramas that used to be TV staples. Last summer, USA found a sizable audience with Burn Notice, a light-toned but action-packed quasi-detective series starring the lithe, angular Jeffrey Donovan as disavowed spy Michael Westen, who picks up some extra cash as a private investigator (while trying to learn who sold him out). Between the glamorous Miami setting, the high-tech capering and the dry humor, Burn Notice made for fine summer escapism: gripping but ultimately undemanding.
As Season One ended, Michael had been invited back into the fold of our shadow government, and accepted because he thought he might finally learn once or for all why he'd been "burned." Following the instructions of a smoky female voice, Michael drove a Spy Hunter-ready Caddy into the back of a freight truck, and waited. As Season Two opens, he's still waiting–and pontificating in voice-over about how spies pass the time while waiting–until his phone rings, the back of the truck opens, and he finds himself surrounded by fire, smoke and corpses. The voice–"Call me Carla," she says–tells him to pick up the frightened, bound computer geek Jimmy off the ground and truck him back to Miami for a job. "A paying job?" asks Mike's buddy Sam (played by the inimitable Bruce Campbell). "No, sort of a, 'We'll kill you if you don't do it,'" Michael replies.
Stylistically, Burn Notice has always had a lot in common with Guy Ritchie's early films, only brighter and more effortless. It's an association "Breaking And Entering" strengthens by having Michael adopt a slow, thuggish British accent as part of his cover for the operation he's being forced to head up. "Carla" wants Michael to use Jimmy to break through computer firewalls he designed himself in order to retrieve some data from a band of technologically advanced mercenaries. Michael adopts the accent, pitches himself as a client, then grills bad guy Ryder Stahl about his security system, so that he can find ways to skate around it.