Take Note: You're Burning

So last year a friend of mine got me into Burn Notice, a television series about an ex-spy who helps out normal people using his special set of spy-skills. It's fun, there's lots of low-tech spy stuff that's intelligent and interesting. It suffers from unnecessarily novel camera work over-reliance on family issues for drama and comedy, as well as the odd recycled plot. There's also some Spider-Man style over-narration, but that's often necessary when explaining why, for example, our hero drives backwards through a stand of trees while evading the police (answer: to avoid setting off the airbags). But on the whole, the good outweighs the bad.

Also, it has Bruce Campbell in it.

So, anyway, we finished Season 1 and were going to watch Season 2 on Hulu, but we'd missed the first couple episodes, so we thought we'd rent it right when it came out and then start watching Season 3 online. Unfortunately, Season 3 started a few weeks ago, and Season 2 only came out on DVD this last Tuesday. Since the shows expire after 5 weeks on Hulu, that means (math majors?) we have 3 weeks to watch all of Season 2 if we want to have it finished in time to start Season 3. Also, I'll be out of town for one of those weeks. If, after 16 episodes on DVD in a very short window, we still have the interest to watch the next 4 online, then we'll be caught up.

Clearly, whoever is in charge of the DVD release skipped the day in marketing class where one might learn that the Season 2 DVD could be a good marketing tool for new episodes of Season 3, but only if it comes out first. Then we popped in Disc 1 of Season 2 and the very first thing to come up was a promo advertising Season 2 of Burn Notice.

Seeing a DVD advertise itself on its first disc, well, that's pretty silly. It does not inspire confidence. It leads one to believe that there is serious ineptitude in the DVD-release-department over at USA. Seeing that very same promo on disc 2 only reinforces said belief.

Le sigh.

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