Flashpoint

Is a hit!

This despite a lot of snarky reviews in the American (and to a lesser degree, Canadian) press. John Doyle has an interesting take on the Canadian-American cultural dynamic here.

Personally I quite enjoyed Flashpoint. Doyle has it right when he says that this isn't a show "...aimed at bending anybody's mind or exploding the genre of cop-drama into smithereens..." Rather it's a solid police procedural...with a twist (c'mon, you knew that had to be there).

Flashpoint is about a Toronto SWAT team (they call it something different, but that's what it is). What sets it apart is that rather than focus exclusively on the cases, it focuses on the emotional aftermath of when the team's forced to pull the trigger.

The pilot ("Scorpio") did a great job of exploring this premise. A man takes a hostage during rush hour. The SWAT team's called in and one of the sniper's eventually ordered to take the gunman out.

All in the first half hour of the show.

It was a great bit of television. Tense, beautifully shot, well acted. All around top notch.

Then things get interesting. On other cop shows an officer would shoot a suspect, be hailed as a hero, might be put under review by Internal Affairs, and then move on.

But the cop is never (or very, very rarely) treated as a suspect.

That's not the case in Flashpoint.

From the moment our sniper pulls the trigger he's treated as a suspect. The cops rope off his rooftop vantage point and treat it as a crime scene. He's forced to strip off the clothes he was wearing so they can be bagged as evidence, before he's interrogated.

Compared to a lot of other shows that have come before, this actually felt like what would probably happen to a police officer after they had to shoot someone in the line of duty.

This was Flashpoint at its best, pulling back the curtain to give us a glimpse of how things might actually work behind the scenes.

It wasn't all good though. The pilot suffered from a lot of problems pilots usually suffer from. Too many characters being introduced at once, so many that we don't really care about half of them (So the black guy gets stuck in the truck? Who cares? The other white guy gets promoted? Whoopdiedoo!). This is exacerbated by the fact that the characters are, for the most part, interchangeable.

In this regard they would have been better off taking a page from The Border's play book. Introduce your characters slowly, focusing on a few per episode, and give them all very specific functions on the team (or at least defining characteristics) to help the audience differentiate them all.

I also wonder how sustainable the show will be in the long term. How many variations of hostage negotiations / sniper shootings can they do? Will the audience tune in week in, week out, to watch the various characters deal with their emotional fall out from similar events? Obviously the show will have to branch out eventually, but when they do will they lose some of the unique elements in the premise?

Ultimately it's important to remember that this was a pilot. It had a few rough edges, but overall it was good, light, summer fun. It'll be interesting to see where the show goes over the next few episodes.

I, for one, am pulling for it though.