Marty, you’ve never watched Burn Notice, so let me explain why I think this idea works without expecting you to know anything about the original show.
Burn Notice ran for seven seasons, from 2007 to 2013.
The basic setup was Michael Westen, played by Jeffrey Donovan, was an American intelligence operative who suddenly got “burned.”
Being burned did not simply mean getting fired.
His government access disappeared. His money was frozen. His professional relationships vanished. People he had worked with suddenly could not acknowledge him. And because of the kind of work he had done, losing government protection also meant that people who might want Michael dead could suddenly get to him.
He ended up stuck in Miami.
Michael spent the series trying to determine who burned him and eventually trying to get back into the intelligence world.
But he still needed to eat.
So every week, somebody with some relatively ordinary problem would come along.
Somebody was getting framed by a boss.
Somebody was being extorted.
A family was being threatened.
Somebody had been ripped off.
They might not have much money. Sometimes they were basically breaking open the piggy bank because they had nowhere else to turn.
Michael would use intelligence techniques, surveillance, undercover work and whatever else he knew to help them.
That was the real engine of the show.
There was the big spy story in the background, but up front there was usually just some person getting screwed who needed help.
Michael also narrated everything.
He would explain how spies notice surveillance, how people get manipulated, how you build a cover identity, how you get information out of somebody or how you recognize when something is wrong.
And there is something interesting about those narrations when you look back at the ending of the series:
They were generally pretty clean.
Even when some very adult, violent things were happening, Michael explained them almost like lessons.
Then you get to the final scene of the entire series.
Michael and Fiona, his longtime girlfriend, have faked their deaths and disappeared. They are raising Michael’s nephew Charlie, whose father is dead.
Michael sits with little Charlie.
And he starts telling him a story:
“My name is Michael Westen. I used to be a spy.”
That is the beginning of the original show.
So my idea starts right there.
What if the seven seasons we watched were essentially the stories Michael eventually told Charlie while they were in hiding?
That does not mean the original series did not happen.
It happened.
But what we watched was Michael’s version of what happened.
And he was telling it to a kid.
That gives you enormous freedom.
Michael can condense time.
He can skip six months here or a year there.
He can clean up some of the violence.
He can leave out sex.
He can simplify complicated intelligence politics.
He can leave out people Charlie does not need to know exist.
And he can make himself sound a little younger than he actually was.
The original series already played pretty loosely with elapsed time anyway. Some seasons essentially run into one another, while other points in Michael’s life clearly have time passing that we do not watch.
So twenty years after the show originally began, you do not have to sit there with a calculator saying Charlie must be exactly this age because Episode 37 originally aired on this date.
Michael was telling stories.
Now we move forward.
Charlie is grown.
His full name is Charles Michael Westen.
And despite being raised by Michael Westen, despite hearing all those stories and despite Michael warning him about that life…
Charles becomes a spy.
Then Charles gets burned.
That is how I would open the new show.
Charles Michael Westen is getting onto an airplane.
He looks like hell.
Clothes messed up.
Face bruised.
Moving like somebody who is trying very hard not to show how much everything hurts.
And we hear:
“My name is Charles Michael Westen.
I used to be a spy.
And yes, sometimes you should listen when your family tells you not to become one.”
Then, as he gets through the airport and onto that airplane, we see fragments of what happened.
His access stops working.
His calls stop getting answered.
His accounts disappear.
He gets taken into a room.
He gets interrogated.
He gets beaten.
Charles understands what being burned is because Michael spent his childhood explaining this world to him.
He knows being burned is not really like being fired.
It is more like a realignment.
Yesterday the people following you were there because they were supporting your operation.
Today some of those same people are following you because they want to know what you are going to do next.
The support is still there.
It has just changed departments.
Now somebody is waiting to see whether you do something stupid enough that they get to put those lovely little bracelets on you.
Charles knows all of this.
What he discovers is that knowing how a burn works does absolutely nothing to prepare you for getting the shit kicked out of you.
Except getting the shit kicked out of you.
Michael did leave Charles one contingency.
If this ever happens:
Get to Miami.
That is it.
Get to Miami.
So Charles gets himself onto that airplane.
He gets into business class, drops into the seat and says something like:
“Uncle Mike was right about one thing.
Business class is always where you want to sit.
And once you pass out, it really doesn’t matter.”
Fade out.
Now we are in Burn Notice again.
Except it is a different Westen.
Once Charles is functioning in Miami, he starts noticing the surveillance.
But that does not surprise him.
There is being watched when you are supported.
There is being watched after you are burned.
And then Charles eventually realizes there is a third possibility.
There is being bait.
Somebody is not merely interested in Charles Westen.
Somebody wants to know who will come looking for Charles Westen.
And there is one very particular person they are hoping will come out of hiding:
Michael Westen.
Meanwhile Charles reconnects with Jesse Porter, one of Michael’s old teammates.
Jesse is older now and has done what somebody with his experience probably would do.
He runs Porter Security Consultants.
Executive protection.
Private security.
Investigations.
Corporate work.
Nothing magical.
Just somebody who took years of government experience and turned it into a legitimate company.
Working with Jesse is Terry.
Terry knew Charlie in college.
She was the computer-security person who was always pushing limits, finding vulnerabilities and doing the sort of things in college that either get you in enormous trouble or eventually get somebody in government interested in hiring you.
She eventually worked in cybersecurity and intelligence herself, then got out and went to work with Jesse.
There is also history between Terry and Charlie.
Potentially romantic history.
Charlie even taught Terry how to shoot when they were in college.
And Terry is the one who gives Charlie his first little job.
Not a major security operation.
Not espionage.
She basically tells him:
“Look, I know somebody who needs help. They don’t have much money. They’re scraping together what they can. But right now you need money too.”
Charlie takes the job because he is broke.
That is all.
Some ordinary person thinks somebody is setting them up or screwing them.
Charlie figures out what happened.
The client is technically taken care of.
Jesse says they are done.
Terry says they did what they were paid to do.
But Charlie keeps looking at it.
Why?
“Because he’s going to do it again.”
And Jesse immediately realizes what is happening.
He has another Michael Westen on his hands.
That is how the small weekly stories continue.
They do not all magically connect to some giant intelligence conspiracy.
They are just people who need help.
The bigger story keeps moving quietly behind them.
Then there is Maddie.
At first, all the audience knows is that she and Charlie know each other extremely well.
She is about six years older than him.
She treats him like a little brother.
She might even get introduced the way Michael’s brother Nate originally was: by attacking him.
Charlie has already been beaten half to death, finally gets himself functioning again, and Maddie decides this is apparently a good time to test whether he is still paying attention.
“Maddie?”
“You’re getting slow.”
“I just got beaten half to death.”
“And?”
You do not immediately explain who she is.
Eventually Charlie says she is his cousin.
And that is completely true.
What the audience does not know is:
Madeline McBride is Michael Westen and Fiona Glenanne’s daughter.
She was born years before the ending of the original show.
Because Michael and Fiona lived extremely dangerous lives, she was kept out of Michael Westen’s world and raised largely by Fiona’s extended family.
Imagine being a kid who spends about twelve years without really knowing her own parents.
Then Michael and Fiona finally disappear at the end of Burn Notice.
Maddie is reunited with them.
She is about twelve.
Charlie is around six.
Now Maddie finally has Mom and Dad.
Except Mom and Dad also arrive with this six-year-old boy they have to raise.
Charlie has just lost his own father and grandmother.
Neither kid has done anything wrong.
But try explaining that emotionally to a twelve-year-old girl who has been waiting her entire life for her parents.
So she takes some of that frustration out on little Charlie.
Over time they become brother and sister in everything except the biological definition.
And one of the things that eventually bonds them is something Maddie can never have:
Charlie actually knew Madeline Westen, Michael’s mother.
Maddie was named after her grandmother and never met her.
Charlie remembers her.
So Maddie asks six-year-old Charlie:
“What was Grandma like?”
And Charlie gives her the kind of memories a six-year-old actually has.
“She yelled at Uncle Mike a lot.”
“She made good sandwiches.”
Little things.
Those become important to Maddie because that is her only firsthand connection to the woman whose name she carries.
Maddie grows up herself.
She becomes a structural engineer working around demolition.
Because apparently Fiona Glenanne’s daughter was eventually going to find a legitimate profession involving making buildings come down.
She knows languages.
She has situational awareness.
She knows weapons because Michael and Fiona were certainly not going to raise children who did not understand firearm safety.
But she is not another spy.
She has her own life.
And she does business with Jesse because some demolition and structural projects require serious security, background checks and controlled access, which gives Porter Security Consultants legitimate work.
Meanwhile the main conspiracy slowly emerges.
Somebody has started finding people Michael Westen crossed during his old life.
Not everybody Michael killed.
The interesting people are the ones Michael left alive.
Harlan, an old friend of Michael’s who betrayed him.
A hacker who once caused Michael serious problems.
Other criminals and operators Michael defeated.
Somebody is paying them.
Helping them.
Maybe getting somebody out of a prison situation.
Removing legal problems.
Basically sparing no expense.
Eventually we find out that Tyler Brennan’s daughter is part of what is happening.
And she has her own Michael Westen story.
She does not have to believe her father was a good man.
He wasn’t.
Her problem can simply be:
Michael Westen used her as leverage against her father.
That happened to her.
So she has spent years hearing one version of the legend too.
Charlie has Michael’s version.
Jesse has another.
Sam Axe has another.
Fiona has another.
Maddie has Dad.
Brennan’s daughter has the man who terrorized her father.
That is why the title becomes:
Burn Notice: The Legend of Michael Westen.
Everybody has a Michael Westen story.
There was even a line in the original show about how something would make a great Michael Westen story if people were allowed to tell Michael Westen stories.
Well, eventually Michael did tell them.
He told Charlie.
But Charlie only got Michael’s version.
The other big trick is that Michael and Fiona are actually present during this new story much earlier than the audience realizes.
They hear Charlie has been burned.
They come back.
But Michael realizes Charlie is bait.
So they do not walk through Jesse’s front door.
They stay out of sight.
You occasionally catch Michael in the background.
Maybe Fiona across a street.
Maybe somebody who looks suspiciously like Jeffrey Donovan walking through an airport behind Charlie.
Nobody acknowledges it.
Because Michael and Fiona are watching Charlie while trying to find out who is watching Charlie.
Then, in the second-to-last episode, Jesse gets into a fight with Harlan.
Harlan gets behind Jesse and uses him as cover.
No clean shot.
Then:
“Jesse.
This is gonna hurt.”
Bang.
Michael shoots through Jesse’s shoulder and hits Harlan.
Jesse goes down.
“Mike! You shot me!”
“I told you it was gonna hurt.”
And Michael Westen finally walks fully into frame.
Then the final episode resolves who burned Charlie and why.
Charlie gets his name cleared.
His credentials can be restored.
The government tells him he can come back.
And now we reach the biggest choice in the story.
The entire original series was about Michael wanting to get back into intelligence.
Charlie has just spent this whole new story trying to clear his name so he can do exactly that.
Michael tells him he does not have to.
Charlie says:
“You spent years trying to get back in.”
Michael answers:
“Exactly.”
Now Charlie has to decide.
Does Charles Michael Westen go back to being an intelligence officer?
Or does Charlie stay out and discover that he can use everything he knows without belonging to an intelligence agency?
And that is where I think this becomes more than just bringing back an old television show.
The original series is about a man who loses his identity and spends years trying to get it back.
The continuation is about the kid who grew up hearing those stories eventually suffering the same thing—and realizing that maybe getting your old identity back is not necessarily the same thing as winning.
And Marty, this is where I actually want the opinion of somebody who never watched Burn Notice.
Forget whether every callback works.
Forget whether you know who Sam Axe, Jesse Porter, Fiona or Brennan are.
As a story by itself:
Does the idea of a kid growing up on sanitized stories about this legendary spy, becoming a spy himself, getting burned, and then discovering the real people behind those childhood stories make you want to know what happens?
Because if that basic story works for somebody who never watched the original show, then the old Burn Notice audience becomes the bonus.
And if somebody watches the new series and starts wondering, “Okay, what the hell actually happened to Michael Westen?”
There are seven seasons waiting for them.
That is the other reason I think the timing is interesting.
You are not only trying to resurrect an old property.
You are potentially creating a reason for a new audience to go back and discover the original one.