The title refers to the burn notices issued by intelligence agencies to discredit or announce the dismissal of agents or sources who are considered to have become unreliable. When spies are burned, they are wiped off the grid, without access to cash or influence. According to the narration during the opening credits, the burned spy has no prior work history, no money; in essence, no identity. The television series is a first-person narrative (including frequent voice-overs providing exposition) from the viewpoint of covert-operations agent Michael Westen, played by Jeffrey Donovan.
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After fleeing a Nigerian operation blown apart by the sudden and unexplained non-cooperation of his U.S. contact, Westen finds himself in his hometown[5] of Miami, Florida, attended to by his ex-girlfriend, Fiona Glenanne, but abandoned by all his normal intelligence contacts, under continuous surveillance with his personal assets frozen. Extraordinary efforts to reach his U.S. government handler eventually yield only a grudging admission that someone powerful wants him "on ice" in Miami; if he leaves the city he will be hunted down and taken into custody, whereas by staying there he can remain relatively free. Consumed by the desire to find out why he has been burned, and by whom, Westen goes to work as an unlicensed private investigator, spy, or soldier of fortune for anyone in town who can pay him any money in order to fund his personal investigation into his own situation as a blacklisted agent. The series juggles these two narratives, with the overall series dealing with why Michael was burned and individual episodes focusing on the cases he works for clients. Although reluctant to get involved in the problems of others, Westen invariably ends up helping people unrelated to his personal investigation in almost every single episode.
Throughout the series Westen battles and outwits an array of mobsters, con artists, contract killers, professional thieves, drug traffickers, sex traffickers, deadbeat dads, arms dealers, kidnappers and war criminals. The series makes frequent use of jury rigging, with the characters improvising devices to do the job of more expensive, harder-to-obtain items.
