Catching Up On: BURN NOTICE

I just finished up Season 1 of Burn Notice, and while I really wanted to like the show, I just ended up feeling indifferent. At first glance, Burn Notice is my kind of program; spies, private investigation, cons, and so forth and so on. I had high hopes for it, but Season 1 was just missing something.

In my opinion, the aspect of the show that was the weakest was the cast. I can understand why people get all gooey over Jeffery Donovan as Michael Westen, but to me he doesn't have the charisma to pull of this type of character. He tries to be the suave, secret spy act, but more often than not he's just wooden. His constant Spy 101 voice overs also get really old really fast.

I should probably love Fiona's character, but Gabrielle Anwar is not sexy enough for me to get on board. I know every female badass doesn't need to look like Yvonne Strahovski, but Anwar just doesn't do it for me. Plus, her forced "American" accent is beyond annoying. They should have kept her Irish lilt the entire time instead of masking it after the pilot.

The only character I actually like is Sam Axe, brilliantly portrayed by Bruce Campbell. Sam fills the best friend, partner, informant, drunkard role very well, and his one-liners and back and forth with Michael and Fiona are usually the highlights of every episode.

You'd also think that the sexy locale of Miami would be a big plus, but for some reason it also kind of meh. Maybe I'm just trained to think that Miami brings out douches with their too cool for school sunglasses (thanks a lot David Caruso). Then again, I don't feel that way when I'm watching Dexter, so maybe it's just the sunglasses bit that gets to me.

The general plot, Michael figuring out who burned him, and some of the jobs of the week are interesting enough to keep me around a little bit longer, but the story really needs to be gripping from this point on. It's just getting harder and harder to watch the show due to Michael, Fi, and their little dance. I'll definitely be checking out Season 2, and then we'll see where things go from there.