Written by Matt Goldberg

The first question I had for you is at what point throughout the series are we going to learn who’s ultimately behind the burn?  Is that something that’ll happen in the very final episode of the final season, and if it is revealed earlier than that is that something—is there a way for the show to keep going and still be "Burn Notice"?

Matt Nix: We could always change the title.  Has anyone ever done that?  Let me put it this way.  Clearly, we’re not just going to sort of resolve everything and just kind of call it a day.  I think USA would have strong words with us if we did that.  But really, let me step back a second and just say in general when you look at an episode of Burn Notice, it’s not really a whodunit ever.  It’s not a show where we spend a lot of time investigating who is the secret person behind this week’s case of the week.  Is it this person?  No, it’s the person you least expected.  No, typically the sort of whodunit aspect is dealt with pretty early in an episode and then the real question for the episode is, what are you going to do about it? 

And I guess I’d say that that is generally a more compelling question for us and fits with what we do on the show better because it’s not really—the show is four series regulars.  It’s not really a show that is about gigantic revelations about different characters—we had no idea that that’s who Sam was, that’s not what we do.  We deal with issues, and so when I think about who is the person behind Michael’s burn notice, Phillip Cowen, the guy who got shot in episode 10 of season one, and that information and $1.50 will get you a cup of coffee.  And so really the question that I think Michael’s always going to be up against is what can he do about his circumstances, and that’s a question that can grow and evolve and will always involve the fact that he got burned but doesn’t necessarily need to always involve the endless hunt for a particular name of a particular person because, I guess I’d just say, well, that’s not the kind of question we deal with on Burn Notice and it’s not a particularly interesting question to me.

The show is kind of a dark subject matter but it’s also very humorous and very funny.  Is it difficult to balance those light and dark sides of the show?

Nix: I think if I wasn’t so naturally inclined in that direction it might be very difficult, but it’s not as if we sort of sat down and said, “I’m going to come up with a formula for a show, let’s do a interesting contrast of dark and light.”  To me, it was really borne out of what I found interesting and what I found funny.  I mean, one of the core inspirations for the show was my conversations with our consulting producer, Michael Wilson, who I’ve known for some years and who had the background in private intelligence.  And he’s a really smart guy and he has a lot of resources and he also had this way of giving me advice that I couldn’t imagine the circumstance that I might be in where I might use it.  But he’d say things like, “When you’re firing a gun, don’t ever turn it sideways because it’ll jam and it’ll stovepipe and then you’ll have really big problems,” and my response was, “I don’t own a gun but thanks for the advice,” and I just thought that was funny.  And so really I’m a guy who was accused of having a dark sense of humor in second grade, so it’s always been part of me.  But it’s kind of a combination of what I naturally find funny—I really enjoy those tonal contrasts—and what I find interesting and what makes for a fun show.   Does that make sense?

I’m curious to know, I mean the story is obviously centered on Sam and Michael’s relationship but the women are really interesting and the fact that they have such an upper hand over Michael in many aspects, whether it’s Carla or Fi, emotionally, and then of course Sharon Gless’s character, Madeline.  And I’m really interested in how you’re kind of pulling out the women’s stories in Burn Notice.  I mean it’s obviously, it’s a guy-centered series but I’d like to know where you’re going to Fi and Madeline and Carla this season as we progress.

Nix: Well, first of all I guess I’d say I’m glad you say that about the women.  I’d say even for a lot of our guest stars like our—think about the second episode this season—our powerless waitress turned out to be a DEA agent who pulls a gun on Michael and certainly I know speaking for myself and I think all of the writers, we just think that’s fun.  We’re always looking for what if this woman was more powerful, it just makes for more fun sparring and we really wanted Michael with regard to Fiona to be—I always enjoyed the idea that she is Michael’s equal in a lot of ways, and I confess I also enjoy the irony that the woman who weighs less than 100 pounds is the heavy on the show. 

But I’d say with regard to where is it going, for Michael’s mom we found that or I found that the most interesting and fruitful direction to go in is to really explore how is Madeline like Michael.  Why is she Michael’s mom as opposed to anyone’s mom?  What is unusual or extraordinary about her, how is she wily like Michael?  And so one of the things that has emerged is, and it’s not as if I sat down in writing the pilot and thought, oh, we’ll do this, but it had a lot to do with who Sharon is as an actress and the challenges of developing of a family story line in an action comedy show, the action comedy drama.  What are we?  I don’t even know.  But she is a manipulative character and she sort of insists on Michael and Nate living inside the fiction that she’s created that their family was something other than it was, and that’s really what Michael does when he deals with bad guys.  He sort of creates a fiction for them to live in that will allow him to manipulate them to get what he wants, which on a week-to-week basis is usually helping some person who needs help, and so we have a lot of fun exploring how are her superpowers sort of the embryonic versions of his superpowers.

And then with regard to Fiona, this season we’re certainly exploring their attempts to be apart, like can they actually pull that off, can they be together, can they be apart, what are the things that keep them together, what are the things that make it impossible for them to fall all out of each other’s orbits, and what are the things that push them away from each other?  And I think just the nature of what they do provides a lot of grist for those questions. 

With regard to Carla, I’d say Carla starts the season as a representative of the folks that burn Michael and as the person who delivers their agenda and then over the course of the season as things evolve, we get to know her a little bit more as a person, not a lot more, because she does maintain a high level of secrecy, but Michael’s job this season is to figure out who are these people and what do they want from me, and she is his access to that.  So I’m covering as much as he can about her, trying to provoke her to behave in a more human fashion, that’s what he’s all about.  Were there any other women you were asking about or was that it?

Is Sam's girlfriend Veronica, is she always going to be off camera?

Nix: No, she’s been on a couple of times and she’ll be on again.  She appears.  You know it’s funny, actually, the nature of a Burn Notice plot and the nature, kind of what we do, we generally have a lot to move through, so we don’t actually mean to refer to Veronica off-screen as much as we do, it just sort of works out that way because cutting to a scene of Sam hanging out with Veronica, you can’t really do any business there, there’s nothing.  So it gets turned into bumpers and things like that, and Audrey’s great and we love Audrey and that’s why she’s back later in the season, but we do end up talking about her a lot off-screen.  But then Sam has a lot of off-screen friends, we definitely enjoy inventing new friends for Sam and so it doesn’t feel odd to us.

How do you feel about revitalizing the whole Florida film industry?  There’s been a lot of press about that.

Nix: Good is the answer.  I feel good about it.  I mean, actually one thing I do, we do have a lot of opportunity to explore because we are outside so much on location, it’s very easy to say that Los Angeles can double or Vancouver can double for anyplace, and it’s true that anyplace can have the inside of a police station because you can build it or you can find a few palm trees in any location or bring them, but one of the nice things about working in Miami is that it’s a big city, it’s a distinctive city, and they’re really are a lot of distinctive things about it, and if you’re not here you can’t get all the fun deco architecture.  The light looks different.  The clouds move differently. The weather’s different.  It is hot, though, I will say that.

One of my favorite parts of the show is the voiceovers with all the explanations.  I think that makes it really distinct.  So how did that come about?

Nix: Well, as I said earlier, the inspiration was these conversations that I’ve had with Michael Wilson, who I’ve known for many years, and we’d just be talking about stuff, science fiction books and stuff, I’d be writing a movie and I’d say, “How would you do this?” or “What’s the kind of thing you could do for this?” and he’d have ideas.  And so we had talked for a long time and then he would give me this sort of idiosyncratic advice, and so that was kind of the jumping off point.  And then since then it’s been interesting because it’s an unusual kind of voiceover.  I mean, we never say anything like, “And then this happened and then that happened,” or “This happened off-screen,” or anything like that. 

Jeffrey Donovan describes how he does them as he thinks of himself as being in some sort of seminar on spying and then he’s talking to a seminar or something.  But it is an opportunity to do, as we’ve gone on with the show and indeed from the beginning, one of the things I realized is there are a lot of things that you can do on a show like ours that are really cool, but what’s cool about them is knowing about them or knowing how they work or highlighting some counterintuitive technique, something that you would think works one way but actually works another way.  And I realized that short of having characters who kind of talk about that with each other, there’s not really any way to highlight all of these fun things that are surprising. 

So actually I learned one last night that maybe will show up on the show someday, but it’s a very common experience that anybody who’s had any encounters with tear gas, when they talk about tear gas they can taste it.  So if you talk to people who were on a bomb squad—it happens that my uncle is on a bomb squad or actually he’s on a SWAT team, and he was just talking about tear gas and he was saying, “Oh, I hate talking about it” because, and all the guys say it when you talk about it, you taste that taste in your mouth.  And I hear that and I go wow, that’s awesome, I love that, but how do you showcase that, you can’t see it.  So the voiceovers are fun for me because I’m that guy at a dinner party who’s like, “Quiet, everybody, I have to tell you about this cool thing that I learned.”  And I mean I got a call from an ex-girlfriend who had seen the show and said, “God, it’s just like hanging out with you for 42 minutes.”  She said an hour but it’s really 42 minutes.  So yes, it’s a combination of the inspiration of those conversations with Michael Wilson with my desire to share fun facts about different stuff.

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