Turn up the heat on ‘Burn Notice’

FIFTEEN minutes and 47 seconds into the second-season premiere of “Burn Notice” (USA, 10 p.m. Thursdays), which was broadcast this month, was a moment that held out a significant amount of hope for the future of this popular if dim series. Former spy Michael Westen (Jeffrey Donovan) has been taking on freelance gigs since getting axed without explanation, recruiting equally shady friends, including his ex Fiona Glenanne (Gabrielle Anwar), a onetime Irish Republican Army operative.

By this time in the series, the couple’s routine is well established: She continually attempts to slink back into his life, and he erects higher and higher walls to keep her out, even though he needs her for work. In the scene, she and another friend of Michael’s, Sam Axe (Bruce Campbell), are surveilling Michael while he is undercover trying to gain the trust of a private military contractor.

They are spotted, though, leading to a gunfight in which Michael has to, carefully, face off against Fiona. He fires a couple of neatly targeted shots at her car, shattering glass but missing her by a mile. She fires back, placing a bullet at the ground between his legs, then grinning madly as Sam speeds away.

Metaphor much?

The intersection of eroticism and violence has been productive for “Burn Notice,” at least in the few moments it has trod on that turf. Last season’s one moment of true feeling came midway through, when a physical struggle between Michael and Fiona ended in aggressive passion.

Otherwise, though, there is curiously little heat on “Burn Notice.” Michael is a spy but isn’t particularly mysterious. He has the carriage and aloofness of a ballroom dancer; that might make for good trade craft but can be flat television. Though the show is set in Miami, there is little use of that city’s essential sultriness. Instead, it is a mere backdrop, home to the necessary archetypes and little more.

Anwar is a shockingly physical actress, communicating more with her undulating body movements than with her dialogue, which is stilted. Apart from her, Michael’s supporting crew is one-note: Sam is cheerily schlubby, and Michael’s mother, Madeline (Sharon Gless), is hectoring and clueless. (Details about Michael’s parents seem to have been deliberately left vague, perhaps in anticipation of a plot twist down the line.)

In the opening scene of the series, Michael was most ungraciously excommunicated from his position while in the middle of an undercover operation in Nigeria -- to discover why he has been burned, in the parlance of the show, is his raison d’etre. It is this show’s “Who killed Laura Palmer?”

And yet that search, easily the most compelling narrative arc here, takes up just a few moments each week. Instead, the lion’s share of each episode is given over to Michael’s do-gooding, in which he uses his espionage skills to help those in distress, without access to caches of weapons, and who are unskilled in elaborate con jobs.

Essentially, “Burn Notice’ is a procedural masquerading as a thriller: Michael jerry-builds some contraptions a la MacGyver, spouts some intelligence-community truisms in voice-over, then brings a vicious evildoer to his or her knees

Problem is, he never seems pleased with himself when he completes these tasks -- only when he learns a bit more about what’s been done to him and why. This season, he has a new handler, Carla (Tricia Helfer), who may or may not work for the agency that burned Michael (which may or may not be the agency he thought he was working for in the first place).

These confused loyalties are the sort that kept “Alias” bubbling well into its later years, but Michael isn’t even particularly circumspect about Carla’s motives. He has his eyes on one prize only: finding out who has it in for him. No flirting with the beautiful and sinister Carla. No black humor about his conundrum. And at the pace he’s going, no hope on the horizon for a resolution.

Note to Carla: A well-placed bullet might do wonders.