Monica graduated from nursing school yesterday, and to celebrate we watched the last two episodes of Burn Notice, season 2. I guess it wasn’t so much to celebrate, as to get it over with so we don’t ever have to watch the show again.
Burn Notice has been obsessing me lately because the show is fun to watch, at least at first, without providing any benefit whatever to the viewer aside from simply passing time in a more engaging way than sitting quietly and staring at the ceiling. If you stuck an electrode into a person’s hypothalamus and allowed him to self-stimulate, the result would closely resemble the action that unfolded on the couch last night.
This has got me to thinking about what I want, and don’t want, from my fiction. What could BN have done to keep me from complaining, and to keep me watching? I’m trying to sort this out, but it takes a surprising amount of analysis to come up with an answer.
I’ll unwrap this little by little, but here’s a final thought for now: you know how they talk about stuff being a guilty pleasure? A James Patterson novel on the beach, for instance; or a show like BN. Music, sometimes. But what does that mean? What is it, exactly, that we’re feeling guilty about?