Burn Notice: The Fall of Sam Axe
- Actor-Shared Background:
- Jeffrey Donovan comes from an impoverished family and has twenty years of martial arts experience (including a black belt in karate).
- Also, in "Fast Friends," Sam mentions that he once got to the "Michigan State Quarterfinals" with his arm (shot put? football?note ); Bruce Campbell is originally from Michigan (the Detroit suburb of Royal Oak, to be exact).
- California Doubling: Michael's adventures sometimes take him to the Bahamas, Puerto Rico, and other points in Florida other than Miami (where the series is filmed), like Orlando, Tampa, Jacksonville, and Tallahassee. While the producers inevitably show a travel montage that includes landmarks, or a shot of (for example) the Tallahassee skyline, the actual action in these episodes is inevitably still filmed in Miami. In some cases, it takes a Florida native to see the differences.
- Directed by Cast Member:
- Several episodes haven been directed by Jeffrey Donovan and when he's not, he also acts as a producer.
- Tim Matheson (who plays "Dead" Larry Sizemore) has actually directed more episodes of the show than he's acted in.
- Fake Nationality: Fiona is a rare triple Fake Nationality: her actress is British, but the character is Irish, faking an American accent. In one episode, the character faked a British accent, but it still wasn't Gabrielle Anwar's actual accent.
- Fake Russian: The Russian Sonya is played by the Israeli Alona Tal.
- No Stunt Double: Jeffrey Donovan, who has been training in martial arts since childhood and holds a black belt in karate, does most of Michael's fight scenes himself.
- Real-Life Relative: Nate's wife in "Enemies Closer" was played by Seth Petersen's real life wife.
- Technical Advisor: Michael Wilson worked as a consultant on the show regarding the inner workings of CIA missions and how spies operate. It is likely the main character Michael Westen was named after him. Show creator and showrunner Matt Nix has explained that nearly every episode involves them coming up with a scenario to put the characters through and then asking advice from Wilson on how he would go about the situation himself.
- Technology Marches On: Played with in episode 5 of season 4 where Michael is stymied by a dated data storage tape.Fiona "14 phone calls, 7 data-recovery experts, and three hours of arm-twisting to even access this drive, and it's unreadable!"
- Michael isn't up to date with the latest spy gadgets largely because he doesn't have the money for it, but before he was burned he spent a lot of time in places where smartphones and computers are luxuries. Once he asked a client for their yellow pages to look up the nearest hardware store and the guy responds, "Bro! I've got a computer!"
- This happens out-of-universe, too. The series came just before the explosion in popularity of smart phones, which would have ended quite a few plots in minutes. Instead of scrambling to place bugs and G.P.S. equipment, mad dashes across town to turn cell phones into bugs, or triangulating from cell towers, in just a very short span of time they could have just tapped a few buttons and downloaded an app or two, to be done with it.
- What Could Have Been: Word of God mentions that originally, Burn Notice would have been a lot darker and taken place in Newark, New Jersey.
- Written-In Infirmity: The scar under Jeffrey Donovan's left eye has been written into the show, as something Michael's abusive father gave him "to remember him by".
