I kind of feel like Burn Notice needs to go away for a while. This isn't a statement on the show's quality. Despite a pretty messy third season, I still enjoy it for the most part. I think the action sequences continue to be among the best on TV, and the hard-boiled dialogue is often a lot of fun. And when I watched the fourth season premiere tonight, I was excited for something that was supposed to take the show back to its roots, to when it ably balanced case of the week storylines and an overarching, serialized storyline about Michael Westen investigating just why he was burned and what it meant for himself and those in his life. Yet, I couldn't really get myself worked up for it. It's only been gone since March, after all.
Now, obviously, what I'm saying is ludicrous. When the show has its finale every summer, all involved have to wait until January for it to come back, which is a longer gap than we have to sit through for most network shows. But the midseason finale is necessarily a less exciting cliffhanger than the end-of-season cliffhanger, and because of the weird way USA spaces out its 16 episodes, you never have to wait all that long to find out what happened. So when Michael dove out of that helicopter back in March of 2009, it wasn't that long of a wait to find out what happened, and I think that robbed the moment of some of its power and helped increase the feeling that season three was as scattershot as it was. Pacing is a big part of TV, and by putting Burn Notice on at two different points in the year, I think USA is robbing it of … something.
This isn't exactly the world's most thought out thesis, but it might explain why I was mostly nonplussed with what was a mainly enjoyable fourth season premiere of the show. Now, part of that may have to do with the way that the plot lurched back and forth, as though everyone involved in writing the episode got to a certain point, then realized abruptly that they needed a case of the week. Honestly, it might have worked better to ease the other characters back into the storyline, to devote a full episode to finding out just what Michael found in the study and the people there who want to co-opt his particular skills. Because the introduction to this secretive organization of burned spies is well-done, and then the first mission between Michael and Vaughn (or Bunny, if you will) is to track down an arms dealer, which leads to some information that he's working with the government somehow (or something).
And then the show abruptly shifted to something else entirely. Michael was back in Miami as abruptly as he was taken away from it, and he was back with Fiona and Sam, and they were taking on a mission, and it was like nothing had ever changed. Look. I get the impulse to do this, and I get why the show wanted to get back to its bread and butter as soon as possible. But you couldn't have gone at this in a different way? Michael couldn't have been in incarceration for a while longer? Fiona and Sam couldn't have worked to try to free him? You couldn't have even given over an episode to that? I'm sure that everything with Vaughn is going to come back to bite Michael in the ass sooner, rather than later, and I'm sure it will be cool, but the way the show gets itself into and then out of this scenario feels a little too deus ex machina to me. (Though if you have to have a deus ex machina on your TV show, you can do a lot worse than recruiting an actor from The Wire.)