Every episode starts much the same way — with yelling, running, and the pointing of guns. In one, a police team arrives at a courthouse as a panicked man in robes hightails it to safety. Cut to: a man with a handgun saying, “Your time is up!” In another, officers storm a house. Cut to: a muttering woman, and a steely-eyed man who tells one of the cops, “I swear to God, I will kill her and I will take you down.” But for straight-up histrionics, it’s hard to beat the one with the young couple in a sedan charging down a Toronto thoroughfare, the police in hot pursuit. An officer trains his rifle on the back of the car. Cut to: a frantic young woman crouching over the baby in her arms. “They’re gonna shoot!” she cries. “They’re gonna kill us!”

In television, it’s called a cold open, a tactic that throws viewers right into a story at the moment of highest intensity. Its importance in any given episode of Flashpoint is emphasized in the show’s very title, a reference to the life-or-death decisions that face not just the people caught up in these crises, but, equally, the members of the Strategic Response Unit (inspired by Toronto’s Emergency Task Force), who have been trained to resolve them. “Those cold open moments have been the subject of much discussion,” says Stephanie Morgenstern, who created Flashpoint with Mark Ellis, her husband and creative partner, after watching news coverage of a real-life hostage taking near Toronto’s Union Station in 2004. “You want to start off with a moment that grips the audience by the collar and won’t let go.”

The device has worked exceedingly well for Flashpoint, the most successful in a new wave of English-Canadian TV dramas that do an awful lot of collar grabbing. When CTV aired the debut episode in July 2008, it was the most watched show both for its Friday 10 p.m. time slot and for the whole evening, with 1.11 million viewers. It’s a rarity for a Canadian-made drama to attract an audience as large as that of a comparable American show, but in its second season, which began in January, Flashpoint’s Canadian ratings hit a high of 1.74 million viewers, placing it ahead of many of the country’s top-rated American programs, including 24, NCIS, and Law and Order: SVU. But what was even bigger news was its reception in the US, where it was aired by CBS in prime time. Only twice before has a Canadian drama series been picked up by a major US net- work: in the mid-’80s, CBS broadcast a nondescript package of late-night filler that included the cop show Night Heat; and in the mid-’90s, the Mountie-abroad series Due South had a sporadic run in prime time, again on CBS.

The big three networks (now five, counting Fox and the CW) have never had much luck with Canadian shows, although programs like Degrassi: The Next Generation and The Red Green Show have done well on cable. But the disruption caused by the American writers’ strike of 2007 and early 2008 made Flashpoint especially appealing to CBS. And the gamble paid off. During the show’s summer 2008 run and its second season earlier this year, it was among the most watched network shows on Friday night, with audience numbers topping 10 million.

Flashpoint was a gamble for CTV as well. The first thirteen episodes cost $20 million, making it the most expensive series the network ever commissioned. The magnitude of the investment put big pressure on the people who made the series, although Mark Ellis praises his co-producers and supporters at CTV for their commitment to making the show as slick as any potential competitor. “That was really smart on their part,” he says, “because they recognized whether you are a Canadian audience or an American audience or an international audience, we’ve come to a stage now where we demand a certain kind of sophistication on the screen.”

Flashpoint’s stellar ratings have stimulated activity on both sides of the border, with two more CTV shows getting US prime-time berths. The Listener, a frenetically paced but disappointingly drab variation on Medium and Ghost Whisperer, is about a supernaturally gifted paramedic who can read people’s minds, not that there’s much to read. The first episode in June attracted 1.1 million viewers in Canada, but in its NBC time slot it placed last, behind shows on ABC, CBS, and Fox. CTV is also producing The Bridge, about cops contending with organized crime and corruption within their own ranks (former Toronto police union head Craig Bromell helped conceive the show), which will air on CBS. And Flashpoint co-executive producer Tassie Cameron is part of the team behind Copper a series that Global is prepping for ABC. Billed as “a character- driven workplace drama about five rookie cops plunged into the high stakes world of big city policing,” it will assuage the feelings of any Toronto police officers who feel that TV producers aren’t sufficiently interested in their lives.

Meanwhile, The Border, CBC’s flagship drama about the valiant men and women at Immigration and Customs Security, a fictional agency dedicated to transborder issues, was attracting a more than respectable 600,000 viewers a week in its second season. It, too, boasts the high production values viewers expect from their American favourites. “It’s a dynamic, fast-paced look,” says series co-creator Janet MacLean. “I tend to resist thinking of it as American, because it’s very much the language of TV in general: the vocabulary is sped up all over.” The show drew interest from several US networks before being sold to Ion Television, a cable channel that also bought The Guard, a Global series about a search and rescue team on Canada’s west coast.

Even with the global recession slowing production (shortfalls forced CBC to cut the number of episodes in The Border’s third season), all this activity would seem to indicate a reversal of fortune for makers of Canadian television. As ACTRA’s Stephen Waddell told Playback Daily, “Canada is ready for the big time. If you look at the programs being produced now, they’re interesting, they’re innovative, they bring a new perspective.” He might also have mentioned that the US networks buy them for a fraction of what it costs to produce their own programming.

But others wonder whether the success of these shows addresses the most significant challenges facing English-Canadian TV production, especially dramatic series. “There’s no question in my mind that Canada has the most difficult problem of any country its size, in terms of supporting local drama,” says Peter S. Grant, a Toronto communications lawyer and author of a wide array of studies on the country’s cultural industries.