how Burn Notice changed television

Spoiler alert: Yes, a major character does die in the series finale of USA’s “Burn Notice,” and yes, it is sad.

But that’s all we’re going to tell you.

The rest you’ll have to tune in to find out, when “Burn Notice,” USA’s blue-sky spy series famously shot in Miami’s Coconut Grove, wraps its seven-season run on Thursday, Sept. 12, at 9 p.m. ET.

“Nobody wanted to peter out and get really stale and have our viewers say, ‘Okay, we are done with you,’ ” says Matt Nix, the show’s creator and executive producer. “I won’t lie: There’s a part of me that mourns the stories on ‘Burn Notice’ that I imagined I would tell someday. But I realized we were running out of ways to do things. In the final season, we were able to interesting things we hadn’t done before without worrying about what the consequences would be.”

That means that “burned” spy Michael Westen (Jeffrey Donovan) and his hodgepodge team — including former Navy SEAL Sam Axe (Bruce Campbell), former CIA field operative Jesse Porter (Coby Bell) and former Irish Republican Army (IRA) member and on-again-off-again girlfriend Fiona Glenanne (Gabrielle Anwar) — spend most of season on the edge.

Prior to this season, creating consequences was starting to be a challenge for Nix and his team: “There were only so many serious consequences you can present before you start running out of show,” Nix says. “But once we went into the final season, a whole new world of stories opened up to us. We started burning the whole city down.”

Besides embarking on that literal crash-and-burn-course, Season 7 marked another departure for the show. It became far more serialized, telling its final season as a 13-episode arc. Previously, “Burn Notice” was constructed more like a procedural, such as “CSI” or “Law & Order,” in which a complete story was told in every episode, while an overlying storyline ran through the season. Season 7 was more about Westen’s battle with himself over who he wanted to be and what he wanted to do.

“One of the great abilities of Matt as a writer and a showrunner is his ability to create a character like Michael, with his ability to compartmentalize how he felt,” says Donovan, who has gotten to take on a variety of accents and personas in his run as Westen — as well as direct a few episodes of the show. “A spy can’t let anyone know how he feels, so he had all of this stuff bottled up about how he felt about things.

“We really let the audience in on Michael’s heart. I owe Bruce Campbell this quote: ‘Michael in Season 7 was forced to feel.’ That’s so dead on. Bruce isn’t very smart, but right there he was a genius for one second,” Donovan jokes.

In a way, Westen is both this season’s protagonist and antagonist, says Nix. He’s being forced by the CIA to bring down a rogue operative, James Kendrick (John Pyper-Ferguson), a sort of father figure who sees the world and does things much in the same way that Westen does. While he’s supposed to be working against James, in many ways he sympathizes with him.

“One of the things that was important to Jeffrey this season was that the voice-overs and the narrative be more internal and more emotional for Michael,” says Nix. “That was a little challenging. It’s rare for a show’s seventh season to be the hardest one to write, but this one was. The show was written in an entirely different way in the last season than in the prior ones. I didn’t realize it would be so hard.”

When “Burn Notice” premiered in June 2006, it quickly established itself as a summer hit, and USA Network as summer’s go-to network for fun, original dramas. It also proved that southern Florida was a viable location to produce shows, with series such as A&E’s “The Glades” following in its footsteps. Since “Burn Notice”’s debut, USA has launched several other popular summer series in its wake, including “Suits,” “Royal Pains” and “Necessary Roughness.”

“Burn Notice” may have excelled at telling exciting, action-packed spy stories that took place in Miami’s colorful streets, but the show was also about forming a family: Westen’s broken relationship with his real family, and especially his mother, Madeline (Sharon Gless), and the new family he’s created with Sam, Fiona and Jesse.

Of course, one of the finale’s big questions is whether Michael and Fiona will finally end up together, and if they do, do they have a chance at happiness?

“Michael and Fi have always been nitro and glycerin and they are very potent together,” says Donovan. “Obviously, they can be very destructive at the same time. One interesting part of their journey this season was that they were apart. What they realize is that whether together or apart, they create just as much chaos.”

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