The history of cinema and television is riddled with secret agents.
Sleek-suited, smooth-talking, hard-fighting spies have been slinking, sidling, rappelling and hobnobbing their way across the screen for very nearly as long as the screen has existed.
It's a natural result that with these character archetypes so well established and so frequently used, strong stylistic trends and conventions are set in place and not often deviated from.
We must consider ourselves fortunate, then, to have been here to see the rise of perhaps the coolest, most original and most interesting spy ever to ply his shadowy trade before a camera: Michael Westen of 'Burn Notice.
' So what makes Westen, and the show, so compelling? It's a combination of several elements that, working together, make him a character who is both complex and easy to empathize with.
First of all, he takes hits sometimes.
Taking a beating is one of the first things he does in the show, one result of his blacklisting.
Second, he has mundane familial issues just like everyone else.
His relationship with his mother is an important part of the series, and he spends much of his time between helping his clients trying to play the part of the son, a son who ran away at sixteen to escape a home made hellish by his now-dead father.
His smooth, trained exterior slips away at times to reveal the pain of memories decades old.
What brings this character so close to our hearts, though, is that he works for us, and among us.
He lives in a dingy loft apartment, he makes his spy gear out of anything he happens to come across, and he doesn't take his cases from a slick boss in a darkened command center with giant screens on the walls.
He is hired by people like us to solve problems that aren't always that different from his own.
And not only does he work for us, he talks to us.
The show is peppered with Michael's voiceover narration, in which he explains, in friendly, witty and charming parlance, the things that he does and how he does them.
He is a spy who always reminds us that what he does and endures is really not that far away from our own experience.
It just has a lot more garrotes and bullets, and as far as I'm concerned I'm happy to keep it that way.