laceblade | Yeah, I went there

In comparing the first two episodes (all I've seen) of Leverage to the first two episodes of Burn Notice, I'm going to go ahead and say that:

--Burn Notice is more believable, most especially in getting its characters to continue to "play along" against their will.

--Burn Notice has more interesting episodic plots.

--Michael, Fee, and Sam do a much better job of changing accents/personas to do jobs.

--Michael Weston and Fiona are much more fuckin' bad-ass than any of the characters on Leverage.

--Burn Notice is funnier, IMO - the cheese gets laid on a little too thick for me in Leverage.

--Annnnd, Burn Notice came first, so I feel like Leverage is a little derivative, considering how similar they are.

I'll keep watching Leverage, so don't freak out.
And I usually don't like making posts like these, it's just that I see posts/fic/etc. about leverage all over my flist on the interwebs, but not a lot of love for Burn Notice. WATCH THAT SHIT. Guns, bombs, sexiness, and Fiona gets turned on by beating Michael up. It is totally hot.

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Mmm...yeah, but Leverage has characters of color, whereas Burn Notice is all about White Guy Solves Your Problems, with some help from other white folks. (Which is not an original insight; I got it from an academic blogger, of all things.) And...I dunno, I'm usually "watching" Burn Notice either from the dining room, which is on the diagonal from the room with the TV, or in the room with the TV with my laptop in front of me, so I don't find the plots terribly interesting. I like Michael's mom and his tradecraft voiceovers, which I file away for possible future use in writing. Fi is awesome too, but only within constraints the show puts on her.

HMMMM, the critique about Burn Notice being about White Guy Solving Problems is extremely valid. (And now that it's been pointed out I kind of feel like a jerk for not mentioning it at all in the post, although I do remember thinking these things while watching it.)

I LOVE Michael's mom - my mother also watches Burn Notice and frickin' loves her (probably because my brother lives in far away and never calls, so possibly she over-identifies).

yeah, I watch Burn Notice with my dad, we like the action scenes.

Leverage is also ensemble and starts delving into non-Nate characters pretty quickly, whereas I seem to remember Burn Notice (I watched half a season 2 years ago, I think? And couldn't get into it, so I'm not exactly reliable here.) as being all about the main guy, with other characters contributing to the plot in terms of how they could contribute to whatever was going on with him at the time. It also does that awesome bit where the frontman who sometimes has a private agenda for the cons and the asocial, borderline-amoral character that would usually be fandoms woobies (and the writers have to know what characters the fans will usually go nuts over) are women.

Hmm...I don't really see how they're similar, except for how both could be loosely interpretted as based on the Robin Hood ideal?

I don't remember much about what I watched of Burn Notice, though. Couldn't get into it, even though it sounds perfect for me on paper.

There's Robin Hood, but there's also characters with various skills of badassery/acting picked up in their former lives as conmen/agents, a reluctance to help people but they keep doing it anyway, sexual tension among the main characters, and lots of sweet violence.

In Burn Notice, lots of cars blow up. This pleases me, :D

That's odd. I've watched both Leverage and Burn Notice and never thought they were all that similar.

But I like Leverage better. I love those characters sooooo much.

Yeah, I went there

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