When Michael is dragged by Nigerian gunmen and tossed into the back seat of a waiting Mercedes, he makes sardonic small talk with the two large, menacing thugs on either side of him: “You know, Mercedes makes an S.U.V.
But heavily armed gangs roaming African streets that evoke present-day Somalia and Sudan are used to comic effect. Michael has a soft spot for children, yet he is so emotionally stunted that he cannot maintain a relationship. “Burn Notice,” in contrast, is cheerfully insouciant about the world’s trouble spots but takes its hero’s inner child to heart. Even dramas that don’t take counterterrorist tactics too seriously, like “Bones” on Fox or “NCIS” on CBS, balance goofy secondary characters (the leering, pedantic chief medical examiner on “NCIS” is played by David McCallum, who starred as Illya Kuryakin in “The Man From U.N.C.L.E.”) with revolting corpses and grisly terrorist plots. These days many television dramas touch on terrorism, torture and covert operations, but they mostly do so in deadly earnest - either with the semper fi patriotism of “The Unit” on CBS or concerns about the Patriot Act on “Law & Order” and “Heroes” on NBC. Even the latest James Bond movie, “Casino Royale,” was grittier and grimmer than its predecessors. The first “Austin Powers” movie, a throwback to ’60s-era spoofs, came out in 1997, long before Sept. Sixties-era shows like “Get Smart” and “The Man From U.N.C.L.E.” were inspired by the James Bond movies, but they were also symbols of cold war confidence, back when mutually assured destruction was a kind of safety-in-millions security blanket, and networks, and their viewers, felt enough confidence in the government to poke fun at its secret agents. It’s harder to tell from where “Burn Notice” takes its tone. Tenet, the former director of central intelligence, recently used “burn notice” in his memoir, “At the Center of the Storm,” when describing an off-the-books effort to destabilize Iran through Michael Ledeen, a conservative Middle East analyst who in the Reagan years was involved in the Iran-Contra affair. The show takes its name from an intelligence term for agents or sources who are marked as unreliable and blackballed.
Of all people undercover agents should keep their real identity crises to themselves.
He is less persuasive when revealing glimpses of his psyche: Michael hints at a childhood cut short by an abusive father and neurotic mother, afflictions that apparently led him to the clandestine life of a spy. Donovan is likeably lighthearted and cool as a smart-mouthed loner his character is a watered-down version of the kind of wiseguy once played by Michael Keaton. This one not only has a mother problem, but an ex-girlfriend one, too: an old flame, Fiona (Gabrielle Anwar), a former operative for the I.R.A., shows up and also smothers him with expectations. The superspy winds up working as a sleuth, relying on the slick tradecraft he learned in covert ops to solve domestic crimes. USA, which is home to “Monk,” about a detective with obsessive-compulsive disorder, and “Psych,” about a private eye who pretends to be psychic, is apparently trying to corner the market on kooky conceits for crime shows.