After finding spy related success on USA Network with Burn Notice, creator/writer Matt Nix has been hard at work to keep up the quirky pace for Season 2 now that the Miami set series is back on the air for a whole new adventure in the 305. Although the cast and crew knew they had something good on their hands prior to first season, they couldn't have asked for better reaction to the show, as Jeffrey Donovan, Gabrielle Anwar, Bruce Campbell, and Sharon Gless are looking to take the take Burn Notice to new heights in Season 2 on Thursday nights under the creative direction of Matt Nix.

THE DEADBOLT: We recently spoke with Sharon Gless and I was wondering what the latest is with getting Tyne Daly on the show?

MATT NIX: [laughs] You know, we’re always interested in fun casting and she’s mentioned Tyne before, so we’ve talked about it. We’ve got a lot of plans when it comes to casting, including her. But when you look at a Burn Notice [episode], they’re generally tight little casts. I just looked at the cast list for the tenth episode and I think there are like eight people, including the series regulars. Usually I go, "What does a Burn Notice have? It has a bad guy, an assistant bad guy, a good guy, an assistant good guy, and then a couple of other characters to round it out." So the day we have the perfect bad guy or assistant bad guy for Tyne Daly, or client, we’ll grab her, because it would certainly be fun. I mean one of the nice things about the tone of the show is that - and this is something you kind of explore, but - honestly, it kind of has something to do with Bruce Campbell [and] just the energy he brings to the show. But it kind of allows us to get away with little winks at the audience from time to time.

Like in the first episode of the first season after the pilot, Sam gave his cover ID with Fiona as, "I’m detective Cagney and this is detective Lacey." And that was an improv and I was sort of like, "I don’t know. It’s the first episode. Can we get away with that?" Since then we just sort of have fun with those things. So we’ve been exploring that while we’re casting. It’s also getting a little bit easier now that people kind of know the show. Because in the first season you’re out there talking to actors and you’re saying, "We want you for a part on Burn Notice." And they say, "Burn Unit? Is it about a hospital? What?" And now it’s a little bit easier.

THE DEADBOLT: Will Michael’s search ever lead him out of Miami?

NIX: In general, the answer is we want him to stay in Miami because what’s really interesting. By clipping his wings we are able to - and keeping him Miami and putting him on these jobs he really has no business doing - it gives us the opportunity to showcase things in a different way. You know there’s certainly other spy shows, but we just have the opportunity to do spy things out of a spy context. And so when you think about, "What if Michael Weston went to Washington D.C.?" Well, what do you do in Washington D.C.? Spy things. So we really want to avoid the "fish in water" syndrome. When you built your series around "fish out of water", going, "What would he do in that there ocean?" [It's] sort of a dangerous question. That said, would I rule out the possibility of Michael taking a field trip at some point for some particularly compelling reason, no. Yeah, we want to keep it in Miami.

THE DEADBOLT: What can you tell us about the Burn Notice tie-in book, The Fix?

NIX: Well, the Burn Notice tie-in book - Oddly, Tod Goldberg, author of the Burn Notice tie-in book, is best childhood friends with a very good friend of mine from college. So I had actually met him years ago when he was just a novelist who sold a book to Hollywood. Then they said, "Oh, we found a writer for the Burn Notice book. He is Tod Goldberg, brother of the guy who writes the Monk book." And I said, "Oh, Tod Goldberg, my friend?" So it’s a very small world thing. I have to say though, we were incredibly lucky because we managed to get a guy who has a thriving book career. He’s a hell of a novelist. He has a thriving book career on his own and it’s just sort of a happy accident that he’s kind of interested in doing a book for hire. He knew me, he knew the show, he liked the show, his brother does tie-in books, and so we really lucked out. We got a guy who’s very funny. He has a good sense for the tone of the show, and from what I’ve seen is doing a great job. And in the books, Michael can do all sorts of things he can’t do on the show, like get on big sailboats that we can’t afford.

THE DEADBOLT: What’s the story behind the yogurt that we see Michael eating?

NIX: What’s the story on all of the yogurt? It’s funny, people think it’s a big mystery and I sort of want to indulge that. But really, it was a combination of things. In the pilot, I wrote in the bit about the yogurt and getting the yogurt from the fridge so he could have, when breaking into a place, doing something so as to make your break-in seem more innocent and doing something that appears incompatible with your behavior, which was based on some real techniques. And so I just threw out - "He grabs something from the fridge, maybe a yogurt." And then when they were shooting it, Jeffrey had the yogurt and then he decided he wanted to eat the yogurt in the scene and we thought that was funny, and so he ate the yogurt.

Then when I was working on the first episodes of the series, he needed to have something in his refrigerator. What does he have in his refrigerator? Well, we know he likes yogurt. And then the writer of the second episode, Alfredo Barrios, thought that was funny and so he threw a yogurt into his episode. And once you get a yogurt in a pilot and two episodes, man, you gotta keep going. So it becomes - it’s just sort of fun. At the same time, I will say that it was inspired by some research that we did, or actually discussions that I had with Michael Wilson [consulting producer]. The essence of which is that operatives do find themselves in circumstances where they need cheap sources of healthy protein. Michael Wilson’s preferred source of cheap protein was canned tuna fish. So Michael could just as easily have been a tuna fish man, but we made him a yogurt man.